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A Leaf in the Storm (8vo. 

Paper.) 

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These Novels are universally acknowledged to be the most 
powerful and fascinating works of fiction which the present 
century, so prolific in light reading, has produced. 

The above are handsomely and uniformly bound in cloth, 
12mo form, and are for sale by booksellers generally, or will 
be sent by mail, postage paid, on receipt of price by 

J. B. Lf^PINCOTT & CO., Publishers, 

715 and 717 Market St. y Philadelphia. 




ID ALIA 


% Srttl. 


BY 


“QUID A,” V- V 


_ X, 


^ v - ^ T \ 


AUTHOB OF “CHANDOS,” “ STRATHMORE, ''ETC. ETC. 

S' 


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'".V 



J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

1881 . 













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4 






• • 


CONTENTS 


Chafer I. — The border eagle 5 

II. — Having broken his bread 25 

III. — SoufFrir en roi 36 

IV. — “ N’etes vous pas du paradis ?” 49 

V — “An ignus fatuus gleam of love.” 64 

VI. — The wisdom of Mother Veronica 74 

VII. — The badge of the silver ivy 86 

VIII. — “Passion born of a glance.” 100 

IX. — Ritter Tannhauser 118 

X. — The sovereign of the round table 131 

XI. — Fairy-gold 146 

XII. — Diamond cut diamond 160 

XIII. — “Die qualst nich als tyrann; und ich? ich lieb 

dich ncch!” 170 

XLV. — “ She smiles thorn down imperially as Venus did 

the waves.” 200 

XV. — The allegory of the pomegranate 207 

XVI. — “Monsignore.” 227 

XVII. — “A temple not made with hands.” 238 

XVIII. — “Cravest thou Arcady? Bold is thy craving. 

I shall not content it.” 250 


iv CONTENTS. 

Chapter XIX. — “ The light in the dust lies dead.” 268 

XX. — “ More great in martyrdom than throned as 

Caesar’s mate.” 278 

XXI. — “ The devil tempted me, and I did eat.” 291 

XXII.— The captive of the church 809 

XXIII. — “Rien que toi.” 323 

XXIV. — Lion and leopard 348 

XXV. — “Stoop down and seem to kiss me ere I die.” 381 

XXVI. — “Why must I ’neath the leaves of coronal 

press any kiss of pardon on thy brow ?” 393 

XXVII. — The story of the past 411 

XXVIII. — “ By morning touched with aureole light ; by 

sunset stranded.” 436 

XXIX. — Beside the sea 452 

XXX. — “The serpent’s voice less subtle than her 

kiss.” 467 

XXXI.— “Let it work!” 489 

XXXII.— “Shall evil be thy good?” 494 

XXXIII.— “Unto his last.” 505 

XXXIV. — “ I give my body forever to inherit punish- 
ment and pine.” 530 

XXXV. — “I would have given my soul for this!” 557 

XXXVI. — “Lost in the night, and the light of the sea.” 588 


IDALIA 


CHAPTER I. 

TIIE BORDER EAGLE. 

It was a summer day late in the year in the wild moor- 
land of the old Border. 

An amber light was on the lochs, a soft mist on field and 
fell ; the salmon-waters were leaping down from rock to 
rock, or boiling in the deep black pools beneath the birches ; 
the deer were herding in the glens and wooded dips that 
sheltered under the Cheviot range, here, in the debatable 
land between the northern country and the Southrons, 
where Bothwell had swept with his mad Moss troopers, 
ere the Warden of the Marches let passion run riot for his 
fair White Queen, and where Belted Will’s Tower still 
rose above its oaks, as when the bugle blast of the Howard 
sounded from its turrets, and the archers were marshaled 
against a night-raid of the Scots. On the distant seas, which 
once had been dark with the galleys of Norse pirates, 
nothing now was in sight but a fisher-boat in the offing; on 
the heather-moors, which had once echoed with the beat of 
horses 7 hoofs, as Douglas or Percy had scoured through 
the gorse for a dashing Border fray, or a Hotspur piece of 
derring-do, there was only now to be heard the flap of a 
wild-duck’s wing as the flocks rose among the sedges ; and 
the sole monarch of earth or sky was a solitary golden 
eagle soaring upward to the sun. 

With a single swoop the bird had come down from his 
eyrie among the rocks, as though he were about to drop 
earthward; then, lifting his head, he had spread his pin- 
ion? in the wind that was blowing strong and fresh from 

1 * ( 5 ) 


6 


IDALIA. 


Scotland through the heat of the August day, and sailed 
upward gloriously with slow majestic motion through the 
light. Far below him lay the white-crested waves gleam- 
ing afar off, the purple stretch of the dark moors and 
marshes, the black still tarns, the rounded masses of the 
woods ; higher and higher, leaving earth beneath him, he 
rose in his royal grandeur, fronting the sun, and soaring 
onward, and upward, against the blue skies and the snowy 
piles of clouds, rejoicing in his solitude, and kingly in his 
strength. 

With his broad wings spread in the sun-gleam, he swept 
through the silent air, his eyes looking at the luminance 
which blinds the eyes of men, his empire taken in the vast- 
ness of the space that monarchs cannot gauge, and his 
plumes stretched in all the glory of his godlike freedom, 
his unchained liberty of life. Far beneath him, deep down 
among the tangled mass of heather and brown moor grasses, 
glistened the lean cruel steel of a barrel, like the shine of 
a snake’s back, pointing upward, while the eagle winged 
his way aloft; there, in his proud kingship with the sun, 
how could he note or know the steel tube, scarce larger, 
from his altitude, than a needle’s length, of his foe, hidden 
deep among the gorse and reeds? The sovereign bird rose 
higher and higher still, in stately flight. One sharp sullen 
report rang through the silence; a single gray puff of 
smoke curled up from the heather; a death-cry echoed on 
the air, quivering with a human agony; the eagle wheeled 
once round, adizzy circle in the summer light, then dropped 
down through the sunny air — stricken and dead. 

Was it more murder when Cmsar fell ? 

The assassin rose from where he had knelt on one knee 
among the gorse while his retriever had started the wild- 
fowl up from the sedges of a pool, and strode through 
bracken and heath to the spot where his science had brought 
down the eagle, at a distance, and with an aim, which 
marked him as one of the first shots in Europe. A hun- 
dred yards brought him to the place where his quarry had 
fallen, and he thrust the heather aside with impatient move- 
ment; he was keen in sport as a Shikari, and he had looked 
for no rarer game to-day than the blackcocks or the snipes, 
or at very best a heron from the marshes. 


THE BORDER EAGLE. 


7 


On the moor the King-bird lay, the pinions broken and 
powerless, the breast-feathers wet and bathed in blood, the 
piercing eyes, which loved the sun, blind and glazed with 
dim ; the life, a moment before strong, fearless, and re- 
joicing in the light, was gone. A feeling, new and strange, 
came on his slayer, as he stood there in the stillness of the 
solitary moor, alone with the dead eagle lying at his feet. 
He paused, and leaned on his rifle, looking downward: 

“God forgive me. I have taken a life better than my 
own 1” 

The words were involuntary, and unlike enough to one 
whose superb shot had become noted from the jungles of 
Northern India to the ice- plains of Norway ; from the bear- 
haunts of the Danube to the tropic forests of the Amazons. 
But he stood looking down on the mighty bird, while the 
red blood welled through the blossoming furze, with some- 
thing that was almost remorse. It looked strangely like 
slaughter , in the still golden gleam of the summer day. 

It you wonder at it, wait until you see an eagle die on a 
solitary moorland that was his kingdom by right divine, 
with all the glorious liberty of life. 

The skill which you would have challenged the first 
marksman in Europe to have beaten, will look, for a second 
at least, oddly base, and treacherous, and cowardly, when 
the Lord of the Air lies, like carrion, at your feet. 

Knee-deep in the purple heather, the destroyer leant on 
his gun, alone on the Scotch side of the Border, with the 
sea flashing like a line of silver light on his left, and the 
bold sweep of the Cheviot Hills fronting him. The golden 
eagle had fallen by no unworthy foe; he was a man of very 
lofty stature, and of powerful build and sinew, his muscles 
close knit, and his frame like steel, as became one who was 
in hard condition from year’s end to year’s end. His com- 
plexion was a clear bronze, almost as dark as an Arab’s, 
though originally it had been fair enough ; his black sweep- 
ing moustaches and beard were long, thick, and silken ; his 
eyes, large, and very thoughtful, the hue of the eagle’s he 
had shot. His features were bold, proud, and frank, while 
his bearing had the distinction of blood, with the dash oi 
a soldier, the reposeful stateliness of the old regime, with 
the alert keenness of a man used to rapid action, clear de- 


3 


ID ALIA. 


cision, coolness under danger, and the wiles of the world in 
all its ways. Standing solitary there on the brown heath, 
his form rose tall and martial enough for one of the night 
riders of Liddesdale, or the Knight of Snowdon himself, 
against the purple haze and amber light. 

In the days of Chevy Chase and Flodden Field his race 
had been the proudest of the nobles on the Border-side, 
their massive keep reared in face of the Cheviots, the lands 
their own, over miles of rock, and gorse, and forest, lords 
of all the Marches stretching to the sea. Now all that be- 
longed to him was that wild barren moorland which gave 
nothing but the blackcock and the ptarmigan which bred 
in their wastes; and a hunting-lodge, half in ruins, to the 
westward, buried under hawthorn, birch, and ivy, a roost 
for owls and a paradise for painters. 

“ A splendid shot, Erceldoune ; I congratulate you I” said 
a voice behind him. 

The slayer of the golden eagle turned in surprise ; these 
moors, all barren and profitless though they were, were his, 
and were rarely trodden by any step except his own. 

“Ah ! your Grace ? Good day. IIow does the Bor- 
der come to be honored by a visit from you ?” 

“ Lost my way I” responded his Grace of Glencairne, an 
inveterate sportsman and a hearty, florid, stalwart man of 
sixty, clad in a Scotch plaid suit, and looking like a well- 
to-do North-country farmer. “ We’re staying with Fitz- 
allayne, and came out after the black game; lost all the 
rest somehow, and know no more where we are than if we 
were at the North Pole. You’re a godsend. Let me in- 
troduce my friends to you ; Sir Fulke Erceldoune — Lord 
Polemore — Mr. Victor Vane.” 

The beggared gentleman raised his bonnet to the Duke’s 
friends with much such frank soldier-like courtesy as that 
with which the Border lords, whose blood was in his veins, 
received Chatelherault and Hamilton in the wild free days 
of old. 

“ Shot an eagle, Erceldoune ? By George ! what a 
bird,” cried the Duke, gazing down amazed and admiring 
on the murdered monarch. 

“ I envy you, indeed I” said his companion whom he had 
named as Victor Vane. “I have shot most things — men 


THE BOEDER EAGLE. 


9 


and other birds of prey — but I never killed an eagle, not 
even in the Hartz or the Engadine.” 

Erceldoune glanced at him. 

“ They are rare, and when they do appear we shoot 
them to insure their scarcity! Perhaps the eagle you 
would wish to kill is the eagle with two heads ? What 
sport have you had, Duke ?” 

“ Very bad ! Birds wild as the But, God bless my 

soul, your bag’s full 1 I say, we’re nearly famished ; 
can’t you let us have something to eat at your place yon- 
der ?” 

“With pleasure, sir, if your Grace can honor an owl’s 
roost, and put up with a plain meal of cold game,” said 
Erceldoune, as he thrust the dead king, with all his pomp 
of plumage torn and blood-stained, into his bag with the 
blackcocks, ptarmigan, wild-duck, and snipes. 

“My dear fellow! I’ll thank you for a crust; I’m liter- 
ally starving,” cried the nobleman, who was pining so 
wearily for his luncheon that the words “cold game” 
sounded to him like paradise. “And, by-the-way, if 
you’ve any of your father’s Madeira left, you might feast 
an emperor; there wasn’t such a wine connoisseur in Eu- 
rope as Regency Erceldoune.” 

A shadow swept over the face of the golden eagle’s foe 
as he whistled his dogs, and led the way for his guests 
over the moor, talking with the Duke. Yane caught the 
look, and smiled to himself; he thought it was because 
the ruined gentleman shrank from taking them to his beg- 
gared home and his unluxurious table ; he erred for once. 
Such a petty pride was wholly impossible to the bold Bor- 
der blood of Erceldoune ; he would have taken them to a 
garret quite as cordially as to a mansion ; he would have 
given them, Arab-like, the half of all he had with frank 
hospitality, if that all had been only an oaten cake, and 
would never have done himself such mean dishonor as to 
measure his worth by the weight of his plate, the number 
of his wines, or the costliness of his soups. 

True, the world, he knew well enough, only appraised 
men by the wealth that was in their pockets; but the 
world’s dictum was not his deity, and with its social heart- 
burnings his own wandering, athletic, adventurous, and 


10 


IDALIA. 


hardy life had never had much to do. He loved the sad- 
dle better than the drawing-rooms; and mountain and 
moorland better than the lust of fame or gold. 

It was not more than half a mile to the King’s Best, as 
the sole relic of the feudal glories of the Border lords was 
named, from an old tradition dating back to one of Mal- 
colm of Scotland’s hunting raids; the place would have 
maddened an architect or a lover of new stucco, but it 
would have enraptured an archaeologist or an artist. One- 
half of it was in ruins — a mass of ivy and gray crumbling 
stone; the other half was of all styles of architecture, 
from the round quaint tower of the Saxons, to the fantas- 
tic, peaked, and oriel window’d Elizabethan. Birds made 
their nests in most of the chimneys, holly and hawthorn 
grew out of the clefts in the walls, the terraces were moss- 
grown, and the escutcheon above the gateway was lost in 
a profusion of scarlet-leaved creepers. But there were a. 
picturesqueness, a charm, a lingering grandeur which it 
had stifi ; it spoke of a dead race, and it had poems in 
every ruin, with the sun on its blazoned casements, and the 
herons keeping guard by its deserted weed-grown moat. 

“ God bless my soul I IIow the place has gone to rack 
and ruin since I was here twenty years ago !” cried the 
Duke, heedlessly and honestly, in blank amazement, as he 
stared about him. 

Erceldoune smiled slightly : 

“ Our fortunes have gone to ‘rack and ruin,’ Duke.” 

“Ah, to be sure — yes, to be sure ! Sad thing ! — sad 
thing ! No fault of yours, though, Erceldoune. Your 
father shouldn’t have been able to touch the entail. He 

was a Well, well 1 he’s gone to his account now,” said 

his Grace,, pulling himself up short, with a perception that 
he was on dangerous ground, but continuing to gaze about 
him with a blank naivete of astonishment. Men used to 
call him a “sexagenarian schoolboy;” it was too harsh, for 
the Duke was a thoroughly good man of business, and a 
manly and honest friend ; but it was true that the sim- 
plicity and candor of boyhood clung very oddly to him, 
and a courtier or a line gentleman his Grace of Glencairne 
had never become, though he was not without a frank dig- 
nity of his own when roused to it. 


THE BORDER EAGLE. 


11 


By an arched side-door, through a long corridor, they 
passed into a room in the southern and still habitable por- 
tion of the house; a long lofty room, lighted at the end 
with two magnificent painted windows, paneled with cedar 
picked out with gold, hung with some half dozen rare pic- 
tures, a Titian, two Watteaux, a Teniers, a Yan Tol, and 
a Memlinz, covered with a rich crimson carpeting, now 
much worn, and with some gold and silver racing and 
hunting cups on the buffet. The chamber was the relic of 
the lavish and princely splendor which scarce thirty years 
ago had been at its height in the King’s Rest. 

“Ah ! dear me — dear me 1” murmured the Duke, throw- 
ing himself into a fauteuil. “ This is the old supper-room ! 
To be sure — how well I remember George IY. sitting just 
there where you stand. Lord ! how fond he was of your 
father — birds of a feather ! Well, well ! we might be wild, 
wicked dogs — we were, sir; but we had witty times of it. 
Regency Erceldoune was a very brilliant man, though he 
might be a ” 

Erceldoune, with brief courtesy to the Duke, rang the 
bell impatiently to order luncheon, and turned to the other 
men : 

“ I hope your sport and our moorland air may have 
given you an appetite, for Border larders were never very 
well stocked, you know, except when the laird made a 
raid; and, unhappily, there is no ‘lifting,’ nowadays, to 
add to our stock !” 

“ My dear sir !” laughed Yane, dropping his glass, 
through which he had been glancing at the Yan Tol, 
“ half a cold grouse when one is starving is worth all the 
delicacies of a Careme when one is not in extremis. I 
am delighted to make acquaintance with your highly pic- 
turesque and medieval abode ; a landscape-painter would 
be iu raptures over it, if you might wish it a trifle more 
water-proof.” 

There was a certain dash of condescension and the sus- 
picion of a sneer in the light careless words; if they were 
intended to wound, however, they missed their mark. 

“ ‘ Starving on the moors’ would not be so very terrific 
to you if you had been six days in the saddle on a handful 
of maize, as has chanced to me in the Pampas and the Cor- 


12 


IDALIA. 


dilleras,” said Erccldoune, curtly: — there is nothing yocu 
“mighty hunter before the Lord,” who is known from thv> 
Lybian to La Plata, holds in more profound contempt than 
“ small miseries.” 

“Eh! What? Were you talking about your father’s 
dinners ?” broke in his Grace, who, lost in his reveries as 
his eyes traveled over the familiar chamber, was not very 
clear what was said. “ They were the best in Europe ! I 
have seen Yarmouth, and Alvanley, and Talleyrand, and 
Charles Dix, and the best epicures we ever had, round that 
table ; I was a very young fellow then, and the dinners were 
splendid, Erceldoune ! lie liked to outdo the king, you 
know, and the king liked to be outdone by him. I don’t 
believe he’d have gone quite the pace he did if it hadn’t 
been for George.” 

Erceldoune moved impatiently; these latter royal memo- 
ries connected with the King’s Rest were no honor to him; 
they were so many brands of an extravagant vice, and a 
madman’s ostentation, that had made him penniless, and 
bought a sovereign’s smile with disgrace. 

“ I dare say, sir. I never knew any use that monarchs 
were yet, save in some form or another to tax their sub- 
jects.” 

Glencairne laughed : he had not seen much of the man 
who was now his host, but what he had seen he liked ; the 
Duke abhorred the atmosphere of adulation in which, being 
a Duke, he was compelled to dwell, and Erceldoune’s utter 
incapability of subservience or flattery refreshed him. 

At that moment luncheon was served : the promised cold 
game in abundance, with some prime venison, some potted 
char, and a pile of superb strawberries; plain enough, and 
all the produce of the moorlands round, but accompanied 
by pure claret, and served on antique and massive plate 
which had been in the King’s Rest for centuries, and was 
saved out of the total wreck of the Erceldoune fortunes, 
and at which Lord Polemore looked envyingly ; he w r as of 
the new creation, and would have given half his broad lands 
and vast income to have bought that “high and honorable 
ancientness” which was the only thing gold could not pur- 
chase for him. 

“You have a feast for the gods, Erceldoune. If this be 


TILE BORDER EAGLE. 


13 


Border penury, commend me to it!” cried Glencairne, as 
he attacked the haunch with a hearty and absorbed atten- 
tion ; like Louis Seize, he would have eaten in the leport* 
er’s box at the Assembly while Suleau was falling under 
twenty sword-thrusts for his sake, and the Swiss Guard 
were perishing in the Cour Royalo. 

“I am sure we are infinitely indebted !” murmured Pole- 
more, languidly, gazing at a Venetian goblet given to an 
Erceldoune by the Queen Regent, Mary of Guise. 

“ Nay, it is I who am the debtor to a most happy hazard. 
Try this wine,” said Erceldoune, with that stately courtesy 
which was blent with his frank, bref, soldier-like manners ; 
— sociality was not his nature, but cordial hospitality was. 

The Duke looked up. 

“Eh ! Tokay ? What, the very wine Leopold gave your 
father? Tiny bottles? all cobwebbed ? ThaVs it ! The 
real imperial growth; can’t get it for money. Ah! how 
much have you got of it left?” 

“But little — only a dozen or so, I believe'; but of what 
there is I would ask the pleasure of your Grace’s acceptance, 
if the wine find favor with you.” 

“Favor with me? Hear the man. Why, its Leopold’s 
own growth, I tell you,” cried his Grace. “As for giving 
it away, thank you a thousand times, but I couldn’t — I 
wouldn’t rob you of it for anything.” 

“Indeed I beg you will, my dear Duke,” said Erceldoune, 
with a slight smile. “ To a rich man you may refuse what 
you like, but to a poor man you must leave the pleasure of 
giving when he can.” 

“ Really, on my soul, you’re very good,” said the Duke, 
whose heart was longing after the imperial vintage. “I 
thank you heartily, my dear fellow ; but you’re too gener- 
ous, Erceldoune ; give your head away, like all your race ! 
— like all, your race ! If your ancestors had had their 
hands a little less free at giving, and their heads a little 
longer at their expenditure, you wouldn’t have this place 
all tumble-down as it is about you now !” 

“Generosity, if I can ever make claim to it, will not im- 
peril me : Who has nothing can lose nothing,” said Ercel- 
doune, briefly. He did not feel particularly grateful for 
this discussion of his own fortunes and his father’s follies 
2 


14 


1DALIA. 


before two strangers, and Yane, noticing this by tact or by 
chance, glided in with a question admiringly relative to a 
small gold salver singularly carved and filigreed. 

“No, you are quite right, it is not European,” answered 
his host, glad to turn the Duke’s remarks off himself, the 
person he liked least to hear talked of, of any in the world. 
“ It is Mexican. An Erceldoune who was in Cuba at the 
time Cortes sailed, and who went with him through all the 
Aztec conquest, brought it home from the famous treasures 
of Ayaxacotl. He bored a hole in it and slung it round 
his neck in the passage of the Noche Triste; there is the 
mark now.” 

“Yery curious!” murmured Polemore, with a sharp 
twinge of jealousy ; he felt it hard that this man, living in 
an owl’s roost on a barren moor, should have had ances- 
tors who were nobles and soldiers in the great Castilian 
conquest, while he, a viscount and a millionnaire, could not 
even tell who his fathers were at that era, but knew they 
had been wool-carders, drawers, butterers, cordwainers, or 
something horrible and unmentionable! 

“Out with Cortes !” echoed Yane. “Then we have a 
link in common, Sir Fulke. I have some Mexican trifles 
that one of our family, who was a friend of Yelasquez de 
Leon, brought from the conquest. So a Yane and an Er- 
celdoune fought side by side at Otumba and in the temple 
of Huitzitopotchli ? We must be friends after such an 
augury ?” 

Erceldoune bowed in silence, neither accepting nor de- 
clining the proffered alliance. 

The sunlight poured through the scarlet creepers round 
the oriel windows into the chamber, on to the red pile of 
the fruit in its glossy leaves, the rich-hued plumage of the 
dead birds where they were hastily flung down, the gold 
and antique plate that was in strange contrast with the 
simplicity of the fare served on it ; and on the dark martial 
head of the border-laird, where he sat with his great hounds 
couched about him in attitudes for Landseer. He looked, 
on the whole, more to belong to those daring, dauntless, 
fiery, steel-clad Cavaliers of the Cross, who passed with 
Cortes through the dark belt of porphyry into the sunlit 
valley of the Yenice of the West, than to the present un- 


THE BORDER EAGLE. 


15 


heroic, unadventurous, unmoved, unadmiring age. Near 
him sat Victor Vane, a man of not more than thirty years, 
rather under the middle size and slightly built ; in his bear- 
ing easy and aristocratic, in feature, although not by any 
means handsome, very attractive, with blue eyes that were 
always smiling with pleasant sunshine, hair of the lightest 
hue that glanced like silk, and a mouth as delicate as a 
woman’s, that would have made him almost effeminate but 
for the long amber moustaches that shaded it, while his 
face, though very fair, was perfectly colorless, which lent 
to it the delicacy, but also the coldness, of marble. 

As the two men sat together — host and guest — antago- 
nism seemed more likely between them than alliance ; and 
in such antagonism, if it arose, it would have been hard to 
say which would be the victor. In a fair and open fight, 
hand to hand, the blood of the Northern Countrie would 
be sure of conquest, and Erceldoune would gain it with the 
same ease and the same strength as that with which those 
in whose veins it had run before him had charged “through 
and through a stand of pikes,” and stood the shock of the 
English lances ; but in a combat of finesse, in a duel of in- 
trigue, where the hands were tied from a bold stroke, and 
all the intricate moves were made in the dark, it would be 
a thousand to one that the bright and delicate Southron 
stiletto would be too subtle for the straight stroke and 
dauntless chivalry of the stalwart Border steel. 

At that moment a dispatch was handed to Erceldoune 
by the single servant who lived in the King’s Rest, and 
served him when he was there. The letter was sealed with 
the royal arms, and marked “On her Majesty’s Service.” 
Its contents were but two lines : 

“ Sir Fulke Erceldoune on service immediately. Report 
to-morrow by 11 a.m. at F. 0.” 

“ From the office ?” asked the Duke, as his host tossed 
the dispatch aside. 

“Yes. On service immediately. East Europe, I dare 
say.” 

“ Ah ! the Cabinet brewing more mischief with their 
confounded pedagogue’s pettifogging, I will bot!” cried 
his Grace. (The existing Government was his pet foe.) 
“When are you ordered?” 


1G 


ID ALIA. 


“ To-morrow. I shall take the night express, so I shall 
not need to leave here till midnight,” answered Erceldoune, 
to set at rest any fears his guests might feel that they de- 
tained him. “ I wish they had sent Buller or Phil Yaughan ; 
I wanted a month more of the deer and the blackcock ; 
but I must console myself with the big game in Wallachia, 
if I can find time.” 

“You serve her Majesty ?” inquired Yane, who knew it 
well enough, as he knew all the State messengers in Eu- 
rope. 

“The F. O., rather,” laughed Erceldoune. “Salaried 
to keep in saddle ! Paid to post up and down the world 
with a State bag honored with Havanas, and a dis- 
patch-box marked ‘ Immediate/ and filled with char, cho- 
colate, or caviare !” 

“ Come, come, Erceldoune, that’s too bad !” laughed the 
Duke. 

“ Not a whit, sir ! I went out to New York last year 
with royal bags imposing enough to contain the freedom 
of Canada, or instructions to open an American war, but 
which had nothing in the world in them save a dinner-ser- 
vice for his Excellency, and some French novels and Paris 
perfumes for the First Secretary.” 

The Duke laughed : 

“ Well, that will hardly be the case now. Matters are 
getting very serious eastward ; everywhere over there the 
people are ripe for revolt ; I expect Yenetia, and Galicia, 
and Croatia, and all the rest of them, are meditating a 
rising together. I happen to know those bags you take 
out will contain very important declarations from us; the 
Cabinet intend to send instructions to invite Turkey, com- 
mand her rather, to ” 

“ My dear Duke, it is not for me to know what I take 
out ; it is sufficient that I deliver it safely,” laughed Ercel- 
doune, to check the outpourings of his Grace’s garrulous 
tongue. “ I am no politician and diplomatist, as you 
know well. I prefer hard riding to soft lying in either 
sense of the word.” 

“Wish everybody else did 1” said the Duke. “If men 
would keep to their own concerns and live as they ought, 
with plenty of sport and fresh air, everything would go 


THE BORDER EAGLE. 


IT 


smoothly enough. There’d be no marring or meddling 
then ; as for this Cabinet, it ? s just what Clarendon said of 
Bristol : ‘ For puzzling and spoiling a thing, there was 
never his equal. ’ If the dispatches you will carry to Mol- 
davia don’t embroil Europe, it won’t be his fault, but 
there’ll be sure to be a postcriptto ’em all, meaning, ‘N.B. 
In no case will we fight 1’ ” 

“ Who is severe now, Duke ? On my honor, you will 
make me feel as if I were Discord incarnate flying over 
Europe with her firebrand. I never took so poetic a side 
of the service before.” 

He strove to arrest the reckless course of incautious 
revelations of the intentions in high places, but it was 
useless. The Scotch Duke was off on the Foreign Office 
ill-deeds, and no power could have stopped him ; no power 
did until he had fairly talked himself hoarse, when he 
drank a deep glass of claret, and rose, with reiterated 
thanks for his impromptu entertainment as sincere as they 
were voluble, and with cordial invitation to his castle of 
Benithmar, a stately pile upon the Clyde. 

“And I hope you will allow me also to return your hos- 
pitalities in kind,” said Yane, with his brightest smile. 
“Since you have the mania of peregrinomanie, as Guy 
Patin calls it, and are always going up and down Europe, 
you must pass continually through Paris. I can only 
hope, both there and in Naples, you will very soon allow 
me the pleasure of showing you how much I hold myself 
the debtor both for the hospitality of to-day, and the ac- 
quaintance to which it has been so fortunate for me as to 
lead.” 

Erceldoune bent his head, and thanked him courteously 
bat briefly — he had no love for honeyed speeches — and 
offered them, as a modern substitute for the stirrup-cup, 
some cigars of purest flavor, brought over by himself from 
the West Indies. 

“How does Mr. Yane come in your Grace’s society?” 
he asked the Duke, as he accompanied them across his own 
moor to put them en route for Lord Fitzallayne’s, the two 
others having fallen slightly behind them. 

“ How ? Eh ? Why — I don’t know — because he’s stay- 
ing at Fitz’s, to be sure.” 

B 


2 * 


18 


ID ALIA. 


“ Staying there !” 

“ Yes. Fitz swears by him, and all the women are in 
love with him, though he’s a pale insignificant face, to my 
thinking. What do you know of him? Anything against 
him — eh ?” 

“ Sufficiently about him to advise you, if you will allow 
me, not to let him glean from you the private intentions 
and correspondence of the ministry, or any instructions 
they may have given their representatives abroad. Only 
talk to him on such matters generally ; say no more to him 
than what the public knows.” 

‘‘What? Ah! indeed. I apprehend you. I thank 
you, sir — I thank you,” said his Grace, hurriedly, con- 
scious that he had been somewhat indiscreet, but curious 
as any old gossip in a Breton knitting and spinning gos- 
sipry. “ But he stands very well ; lie comes of good blood, 
I think. He is a gentleman ; you meet him at the best 
Courts abroad.”. 

“ Possibly.” 

“ Then what the deuce is there against him ?” 

“I am not aware that I said there was anything. Sim- 
ply, I know his character; I know he is an adventurer — a 
political adventurer — associated with the ultra parties in 
Italy and Hungary. I do not think his social status is 
anything very remarkable, and I repeat my advice ; do not 
take him into political confidence.” 

“ If the man can’t be trusted, the man’s a blackguard !” 

“ My dear Duke ! la haute politique will not admit of 
such simplifications. A man may be a great man, a great 
minister, a great patriot, but all the same he may be — 
politically speaking — a great cheat! Indeed, is there a 
statesman who is not one ?” 

“True, true — uncomfortably true,” growled his Grace; 
“but of Victor Vane — what’s there against him ? What 
do you know — what would you imply?” 

“I ‘imply’ nothing; it is the most cowardly word in 
the language. I know very little, and that little I have 
said to place your Grace on your guard ; and it is no se- 
cret; Mr. Vane is well known abroad to be the determi- 
nate foe of Austria, and to be widely involved in political 
intrigues. Of his career I know no further ; and of what 


THE BORDER EAGLE. 


19 


I have said he is welcome to hear every word,” said Ercel- 
doune, with a dash of decision and impatience, while he 
paused and pointed to a road running round a bend of 
gray gorse-covered rock beside a brown and rapid moor 
stream, which would lead them to a short cut across the 
fells homeward. 

There they parted in the bright warm August after- 
noon, as the sun began to sink toward the westward ; his 
guests soon lost to sight behind the wild woodland growth 
of the half savage glen, while the last of the Border lords 
turned backward to his solitary and ruined homestead, 
sweeping over the heather with the easy swinging step of 
the bred mountaineer, followed by his brace of staghounds 
and two black and tan setters. 

“ Salaried to keep in saddle ! Paid to post up and 
down Europe !” he had said, with a certain disdain, for 
Ereeldoune was nothing more or less than a Queen’s mes- 
senger; a State courier, bound to serve at a State sum- 
mons; holding himself in readiness for Russia or Teheran, 
for ice-fields or sun-scorched tropics, for the swamps of 
Mexico or the rose plains of Persia, at a second’s notice. 
But he suited the life, and the life suited him ; for he was 
a keen sportsman, and the first rider in Europe; was 
equally at his ease in an Arab camp and a Paris cafe, in a 
Polish snow-storm, with the wolves baying in wrath and 
famine about the sleigh, and in the chancellerie of a Brit- 
ish plenipotentiary over the dainty dishes of a First Sec- 
retary’s dinner; and had an iron constitution, a frame 
steeled to all changes of climate or inroads of fatigue, and 
that coolness under close peril, and utter indifference to 
personal indulgence, which made him renowned in the 
messenger service, and as much at home in the Desert as a 
Sheikh. Indeed, the Desert life could not have been 
bolder, and freer, and simpler than that which Ereeldoune 
had led from his boyhood, partly from nature, partly from 
habit; he had as much of the barbaric chief in him as he 
had of the man of the world. 

His father — Regency Ereeldoune, as he was called, from 
his alliance with “ the mad Prince and Poyniugs ” — had 
been a gambler, a debauchee, and a drunkard, though a 


20 


IDALIA. 


gentleman with it all. Such orgies as George Rex had 
at the Cross Deep, his friend and favorite had at King’s 
Rest, mad, witty, riotous, and shameless as the worst days 
of lascivious Rome. Lands and money went in them till 
there were neither left; and his son, brought to them and 
taught them while he was nothing but a child, had sick- 
ened of the vice in which he was steeped as thoroughly as, 
had he been brought up by precisians, he would have 
craved and loved it. He saw men leveled with brutes, 
and made far more bestial than the beasts; and his nature 
reared itself out of the slough, and refused the slavery of 
sensuality. If he were too early contaminated, he was all 
the earlier revolted. 

When he was twenty-two his father died ; and he was 
left the last Master of King’s Rest (by the old title long 
dropped in desuetude), with some miles of moorland and 
a beggared fortune, not a single relative, and not a chance 
of a career. A certain wild and witty peer, who had been 
prominent in the orgies of the Roissy of the Border — say- 
ing nothing to him, for the Erceldoune stock was famous 
for a pride, which perished rather than bend — got him 
offered a messengership ; and his first meeting with offi- 
cials at the Foreign Office was characteristic, and had not 
a little influence on his career. In the Board-room, at the 
hour when he was being received by those sleepy and sol- 
emn personages the Heads of a Department, there lounged 
in a minister, as celebrated for his cheery and facetious 
humor as for hi3 successful and indomitable statesman- 
ship ; for his off-hand good nature as for his foreign poli- 
cies. The Heads bowed submissive before my lord ; ray 
lord gave his. rapid, lucid orders, and, as he was lounging 
out again, put up his eye-glass at Erceldoune. 

“ Messengers}} ip ? We’ve too many messengers already,” 
he said, cutting in two the reply of the Board to his inter- 
rogation. “ Only ride over one another’s way, and lose 
half the bags among them. Who are you, sir?” 

“Fulke Erceldoune,” said the Border lord, with no 
birthright but some barren acres of heather, returning the 
great Minister’s stare as calmly and as haughtily; inso- 
lence he would not have brooked from an emperor. 

“ Erceldoune I God bless my soul, your father and I 


THE BORDER EAGLE. 


21 


were like brothers once,” said his lordship, breaking off 
his sharp autocratic cross-examination for the sans fagon 
good-hearted familiarity of tone, most usual and congenial 
to him. “Not a very holy fraternity either 1 Monks of 
Medmenham ! Who sent you up for a messengership ? 
Lord Longbourn ? Ah 1 very happy to appoint you. Go 
in for your examination as soon as you like.” 

“1 thank you, my lord, no. You have said, * You have 
too many messengers already.’” 

The minister stared a minute, and then laughed. 

“Pooh, pooh 1 Never mind what I said! If you’re 
like what your father was, you won’t complain of a sine- 
cure.” 

The boy-master of King’s Rest bowed to the cabinet 
counselor. _ 

“ I am not what he was; and I do not take money from 
the State, if the State do not need my services. I did not 
come here to seek a pension !” 

The great statesman stared at him a second with a 
blank amazement; his condescension had never met with 
such a rebuff and such a scruple in all his length of years 
and of office. The grave and reverend Heads that bent 
to the earth in docility and servility before the Foreign 
Secretary, gazed at the offender with such horror of repro- 
bation as the members of the Inquisition might have be- 
stowed on a blasphemer who had refiled the Host and 
rebelled against the Holy See. Erceldoune stood his 
ground calmly and indifferently; he had said simply what 
he meant, and, in the pride of his youth and his ruin, he 
was grandly careless whether be bad closed the door of 
every career upon himself, and condemned himself to starve 
for life on bis profitless acres of tame and gorse. 

The Minister looked at him, with bis keen blue eyes 
reading the boy through and through ; then a rich humor 
lighted up their glittering azure light, and he laughed 
aloud — a mellow, ringing, Irish mirth, that startled all the 
drowsy echoes and pompous stillness of Downing Street. 

“You hit hard and straight, my young Sir Fulke ! 
Very dangerous habit, sir, and very expensive : get rid of 
it ! Go before the commissioners to-morrow, and pass 
your examination. I’ll give you an att&cheship, if > ou like 


22 


IDALIA. 


it better, but I don’t think you’ll do for diplomacy! I 
shall see you again. Good day to you.” 

The Minister nodded, and left the Board-room with as 
much dash and lightness in his step when he ran down 
stairs, as if he were still a Harrow boy ; and, in that two 
minutes’ interview in the Foreign Office, Erceldoune had 
made a friend for life in one who — if he had a short politi- 
cal memory, and took up policies, or treaties, and dropped 
them again with a charming facility and inconstancy, as 
occasion needed — was adored by every man he employed, 
and was as loyal to his personal friendships as he was 
staunch to his personal promises. 

True to his word, he gave Erceldoune his choice of an 
attacheship, a messengership, a commission, or one of 
those fashionable and cozy appointments in Downing 
Street where younger sons and patrician proteges yawn, 
make their race books, discuss the points of demi-reps and 
rosieres, circulate the last epigram round the town, manu- 
facture new and sublimated liqueur recipes, and play at 
baccarat or chicken hazard in the public service. Ercel- 
doune took the messengership; from a motive which 
strongly colored his character and career even then — 
honor. 

His father, deep in a morass of embarrassments, had 
lived like a prince of the blood; his son had taken, in 
sheer revulsion, an utter abhorrence of all debt. He had 
been steeped in dissolute vices and lawless principles from 
his earliest years; and the mere wildness of men of his 
own years looked childish, and was without charm, beside 
the orgies through which he had passed his novitiate while 
yet in his youngest boyhood. He had seen men of richest 
wit, highest powers, brightest talents, noblest blood, sud- 
denly disappear into darkness and oblivion, to drag on an 
outlawed life in some wretched continental town, through 
that deadly curse of usury, which had given their heritage 
to the Hebrews, and let them glitter leaders of fashion for 
a decade, only to seize their lives more surely at the last; 
and he had sworn never to give his own life over to the 
keeping of that vampire which lulls us into an opium-like 
dream for one short hour, to drain our best blood drop by 
drop with its brute fangs and its insatiate thirst. Had he 


THE BORDER EAGLE. 


23 


gone into the army, where his own wishes would have led 
him, or had he taken one of the diplomatic or civil fash- 
ionable appointments offered him, the circles into which he 
would have been thrown must have flung him into debt, 
and into every temptation to it, however he might have 
resisted ; he must have lived as those about him lived ; the 
mere bare necessities of his position would have entailed 
embarrassments from which the liberty of his nature re- 
volted as from a galley-slave’s fetters. In Erceldoune’s 
creed a landless gentleman was worthy of his blood so long 
as he was free — no longer. 

Therefore he entered the messenger service ; and, on the 
whole, the life, which he had now led for about a score of 
years, suited him as well as any, save a soldier’s, could 
have done ; the constant travel, the hard riding, the fre- 
quent peril, the life of cities alternating with the life of ad- 
venture — these were to his taste. And while in the capitals 
of Europe there was not a woman who could beguile, or a 
man who could fool him, the Mexican guachos found in 
him a rider fleet and fearless as themselves; the French 
Zephyrs knew in him a volunteer, fiery, and elastic as any 
their battalions held ; the fishers of Scandinavia had lived 
with him through many a blinding icy midnight sea-storm ; 
the Circassians had feasted and loved him in their mighty 
mountain strongholds ; and the Bedaweens welcomed as 
one of themselves the Frank, who rode as they rode, with- 
out heeding the scorch of the brazen skies and sands; who 
could bring down a vulture on the wing whirling right be- 
twixt his sight and the burning sun, a black speck on the 
yellow glare ; who could live like themselves, if needs be, 
on a draught of water and a handful of maize or of dates, 
and who cared for no better bed than their desert solitudes, 
with his saddle beneath his head, and the desert stars 
shining above. 

Love he had known little of; no human life had ever 
become necessary to his, or ever obtained the slightest 
sway over, or hold upon, his own ; in this he was excep- 
tionally fortunate. What were dear to him were those 
profitless, useless moorland wastes of heath and heron- 
creeks, of yellow gorse, and brown still pools, the sole 
relics of his barren Border heritage, and which self-denial 
and renunciation had kept free from claim or burden. 


24 


ID ALIA. 


The sun was shining full on the King’s Rest as he re- 
turned, and he leaned over the low gate of the stable en- 
trance, looking at the ivy-hidden ruins, which were all which 
remained to him of the possessions of a race that had once 
been as great as the Hamilton, the Douglas, or the Graeme, 
and of which an empty title alone was left him, as though 
to make his poverty and its decay more marked. These 
did not often weigh on him; he cared little for riches, or 
for what they brought; and in the adventure and the vigor 
of a stirring wandering life there were a richness of color- 
ing and a fullness of sensation which, together with a cer- 
tain simplicity of taste and habit that was natural to him- 
self, prevented the pale hues and narrow lines of impov- 
erished fortunes from having place or note. But now the 
Duke’s words had recalled them; and he looked at the 
King’s Rest with more of melancholy than his dauntless 
and virile nature often knew. There, over the lofty gate- 
way, where the banner of a great feudal line had floated, 
the scarlet leaves of the Virginian parasite alone were given 
to the wind. In the moat, where on many a summer night 
the night riders had thundered over the bridge to scour 
hill and dale with the Warden of the Marches, there were 
now but the hoot of the heron, the nests of the water-rat, 
and the thick growth of sedges and water-lilies. In the 
chambers where James IV. had feasted, and Mary Stuart 
rested, and Charles Edward found his loyalest friends and 
safest refuge, the blue sky shone through the open rafters, 
and the tattered tapestry trembled on the walls, and the 
fox and the bat made their coverts ; the grand entrance, 
the massive bastions, the stately towers which had been 
there when the bold Border chieftains rode out to join the 
marching of the clans, had vanished like the glories of Ai- 
naschar’s dream, all that remained to tell their place a 
mound of lichen-covered ruin, with the feathery grasses 
waving in the breeze ; — it was the funeral pile of a dead 
race. 

And the last of their blood, the last of their title, stood 
looking at it in the light of the setting sun with a pang at 
his heart. 

“ Well ! better so than built up with dishonored gold 1 
The power and the pomp are gone, but the name at least 


HAYING BROKEN IIXS BREAD. 


25 


is stainless,” thought Falke Erceldoune, as he looked away 
from the dark and shattered ruins of his heritage, across 
the moorland, golden with its gorse, and toward the free 
and sunlit distance of the seas, stretching far and wide. 


CHAPTER II. 

HAVING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 

“What did you think of that man?” said Lord Pole- 
more to Victor Vane that evening over his coffee in the 
drawing-rooms, out of the Duke’s hearing. 

“ Think of him ? think of him ? Well ! — I think he will 
die a violent death.” 

“Good gracious 1” said the peer, with a little shiver. 
Why ?” 

“I never analyze!” laughed Victor, softly. “I think 
so, — because I think so. He will get shot in a duel, per- 
haps, for saying some barbaric truth or other in the teeth 
of policy.” 

“ Who is that you are prophesying for with such charm- 
ingly horrible romance ?” asked a very pretty woman. 

“Fellow we met on the moor,” answered Polemore. 
“Queer fellow ! Beggar, you know, — holes in the carpets, 
rats in the rooms, — and yet, on my honor, Venice goblets 
and Mexican gold ! Absurd !” 

“ What ! a beggar with holes in his coat and rats in his 
pockets with Venice glass and Mexican ingots !” cried the 
beautiful blonde, who had been listening languidly. 

“No, no! Not that sort of beggar, you know,” inter- 
posed the peer. “ Man that lives in a lot of ruins. Mes- 
senger fellow — lunched with him to-day. Wretched place ; 
only fit for bats; no household, no cook, no anything; 
odious dungeon ! And yet, on my word, if the fellow isn’t 
ridiculous enough to serve up his dry bread on gold salvers, 
and pour his small beer into Cinque Cento glasses!” 

a 


26 


IDALIA. 


“ Come ! we bad very fair wine considering it was a Bar- 
mecide’s feast,” laughed Vane. 

“Height of absurdity, you know!” went on Polemore, 
waxing almost eloquent under the spurs of the twinges of 
envy he had felt while at luncheon. “Fancy, Lady Au- 
gusta ! here’s a man nothing but a courier, he says himself, 
always racing up and down Europe with bags ; so hard up 
that he has to shoot for himself everything that he eats, 
and living in a wretched rat-hole I wouldn’t turn a dog 
into ; yet keeps gold and silver things fit for a prince, and 
tells you bombastical stories about his ancestors having 
been caciques of Mexico ! For my part, I don’t doubt he 
stole them all 1” 

“Bravo! Bravissimo !” laughed Victor Vane. “And 
what is much more, Lady Augusta, this Border savage 
wears deer-skins in the rough, ‘lifts’ cattle when the moon’s 
dark, and has a fricassee of young children boiling in a caul- 
dron. Quite a V antique , you see !” 

“But who is the creature?” asked the lady, a little be- 
wildered, a little interested, and a good deal amused. 

“Oh — let me see — ah! he calls himself Fulke Ercel- 
doune,” said Polemore, with an air of never having heard 
the title, and of having strong reasons for believing it a 
false one. 

A man standing near turned at the name. 

“Fulke? You are talking of Fulke Erceldoune? Best 
fellow in the world, and has the handsomest strain of black- 
tan Gordon setters, bred on the Regent and Rake cross, 
going anywhere.” 

“Oh — ah — do you know him, then?” murmured Pole- 
more, a little discomfited. 

“Rather! First steeple-chaser in the two countries; 
tremendous pots always on him. Know him ! — ask the 
Shire men. Saved my life, by-the-way, last year — fished 
me out of the Gulf of Spezzia, when I was all but spent ; 
awful tempest at the time ; very nearly drowned himself. 
Is he here, do you say ?” 

“ He’s at that wretched rat-hole of his,” grumbled Pole- 
more, sorely in wrath. 

“King’s Rest? Didn’t know that. Go and see him 
to-morrow.” 


HAYING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 


27 


“What remarkably conflicting statements!” murmured 
Lady Augusta, with languid amusement. “A beggar and 
a savage! — a preux chevalier and a paladin of chivalry! 
Singular combination this — what is it ? — Fulke Ercel- 
doune.” 

“Nay,” laughed Yane, “it was a combination common 
enough in the old days of chivalry, and our friend seems 
to me better suited to the Cinque Cento than the present 
century. Just the sort of man to have been a Knight Tem- 
plar with Coeur de Lion, or an adventurer with Pizarro, 
with no capital and no credit but his Toledo blade.” 

“ Trash !” said the absent man’s defender, with impatient 
disdain that almost roused him into energy, “ Erceldoune 
is a splendid fellow, Lady Augusta. I only wish you could 
see him ride to hounds. In saddle ; in sport; on a yacht 
deck in a storm ; with any big game you like — pigs, bisons, 
tigers; swimming in the Turkish waters in mid-winter; 
potting lions with the Kabyles and the Zouaves — put him 
where you will, he’s never at a loss, never beaten, and can 
do more than twenty men put together. Dash and science, 
you know ; when you get the two together, they always 
win. As for money — all the good old names are impover- 
ished now, and it’s the traders only who have any gilding.” 

With which fling at Polemore — whose fathers were of 
the Cottonocracy — the champion, something disgusted at 
having been entrapped into such a near approach to any- 
thing like interest and excitement, turned away, and began 
to murmur pretty nothings, in the silkiest and sleepiest of 
tones, into the ear of a Parisian marquise. 

“ Extreme readiness to break your neck, and extreme 
aptitude for animal slaughter, always appear to be the 
English criterion of your capabilities and your cardinal 
virtues,” murmured Yane, with his low light laugh, while 
Polemore, sulkily aggrieved, muttered to himself : 

“ Man that’s a beggar to keep Mexican things and have 
his bare bones served up on gold dishes — ridiculous, pre- 
posterous ! If he’s so poor, he must be in debt : and if 
he’s in debt he ought to sell them, out of common honesty. 
Cheats his creditors — clearly cheats his creditors !” 

And so — having broken his bread and eaten his salt — 
they talked of him : there are a few rude nomad Arab vir- 


28 


IDALIA. 


tues that have died out with civilization ; and the Sheikh 
will keep faith and return your hospitalities better than 
Society. 

That evening, a Dalmatian, who was the body-servant 
of Victor Vane, a very polished and confidentially useful 
person, rode over to the little station nearest Lord Fitzal- 
layne’s, and sent a telegram, which he read from a slip of 
paper, to Paris. It ran thus, save that it was in a poly- 
glot jumble of languages which would have defied any 
translation without a key : 

“ The Border Eagle flies eastward. Clip the last feather 
of the wing. Only La Picciola. Idalia or pearls of lead, 

as you like. Take no steps till beyond the King’s. Then 

make sure, even if White coats in full muster ; Crescent 

horns up ; Perfide, as usual, brags but won’t draw. N.B. 
The Eagle will give you beak and talons.” 

Which, simply translated, meant — 

“Erceldoune, Queen’s Courier, will take the F. 0. bags 
into the Principalities. Relieve him of the last dispatches 
he has with him. We only want the smallest bag. I leave 

you to choose how to manage this; either with a success- 

ful intrigue or a sure rifle-shot. Do not stop him till he is 
beyond Turin. Secure the papers, even if you have to 
take his life to get them. The Austrians are in strong 
force everywhere ; matters in Turkey, as regards the Prin- 
cipalities, are against us ; England, as usual, bullies, but 
will not be drawn into a war. N.B. This Erceldoune will 
give you trouble, and fight hard.” 

And being translated by the recipient in all its intri- 
cacies of implication and command, would mean far more. 

The tired telegraph clerk, who yawned and did nothing 
all day long in the little out-of-the-world Border station, 
save when he sent a message for the lodge to town, rubbed 
his heavy eyes, stared, told off the jumbled Babel of phrases 
with bewildered brain, and would barely have telegraphed 
them all in due order and alphabet but for the dextrous 
care of the Dalmatian. 

While the message was being spelled out, the night-ex- 
press dashed into the station, with red lamps gleaming 
through the late moonless night, and its white steam cloud 
flung far out on the gloom, flashing on its way from Edin- 


HAVING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 


23 


burgh across the Border land, — a tall man, dressed in a dark 
loose coat of soft Canadian furs, with a great cheroot in his 
mouth, ran up the station stairs, and threw down his gold : 

“ First class to town ; — all right.” 

He took his ticket, flung open a door of an unoccupied 
carriage, and he threw himself into a seat with the rapidity 
of one used never to idle time and never to be kept waiting 
by others, and the train, with a clash and a clang, darted 
out into the darkness, plunging down into the gloom as 
into the yawning mouth of Avernus, its track faintly told 
by the wraith-like smoke of the wreathing steam and the 
scarlet gleam of the signal-lamps. 

The Dalmatian had looked after him with some curiosity: 

“ Who is that?” he asked the clerk. 

“ Erceldoune, of the King’s Rest. He is a Queen’s mes- 
senger, you know, always rushing about at unearthly times, 
like a wandering Jew. I say, what the dickens is that 
word; Arabic, ain’t it?” 

The Dalmatian, with a smile, looked after the train, then 
turned and spelt out the words. 

“Such gibberish ! If that ain’t a rum start somehow or 
other, I’m a Dutchman,” thought the telegraphist, with a 
yawn, returning to his dog-eared green-covered shilling 
novel, relating the pungent adventures of a soiled dove of 
St. John’s Wood, and showing beyond all doubt — if any- 
body ever doubted it yet — that virtue, after starving on 
three-halfpence a shirt, will be rewarded with pneumonia 
and the parish shell,, while vice eats her truffles, drinks her 
wines, and retires with fashionable toilets, and a compe- 
tence, to turn repentant and respectable at leisure. Mean- 
while, the night-express rushed on through silent hills, and 
sleeping hamlets, over dark water-pools and through bright 
gaslit cities, and above head the electric message flashed, 
outstripping steam, and flying, like a courier of the air, 
toward France before the man it menaced. 

With noon on the morrow the best-known messenger in 
the service reported himself at the Foreign Office, received 
dispatches for Paris, Turin, and Jassy, and started with 
the F. 0. bags as usual express. 

Had any prophet told him that as he lay back in the 
mail train, with a curled silver Eastern pipe coming out of 

3 * 


BO 


ID ALIA. 


his waving beard, and papers of critical European import 
in the white bags lying at his feet, Chance was drifting him 
at its wanton caprice as idly and as waywardly as tho 
feathery smoke it floated down on the wind, Erceldoune 
would have contemptuously denied that Chance could ever 
affect a life justly balanced and rightly held in rein. He 
would have said Chance was a deity for women, fatalists, 
and fools ; a Fetish worshiped by the blind. The Border 
chiefs of the King’s Rest had believed in the might of a 
strong arm and in the justice cleft by a long two-edged 
sword, and had left weaklings to bow to Hazard : — and 
the spirit of their creed was still his. 

Yet he might have read a lesson from the death of the 
moorlaud eagle; — one chance shot from the barrel hid in 
the heather, and power, strength, liberty, keen sight, and 
lordly sovereignty of solitude were over, and the king-bird 
reeled and fell 1 

But to draw the parable would not have been at all like 
his vigorous nature ; — a State courier has not much habi- 
tude or taste for oriental metaphors and highly-spiced ro- 
mances, and he had too much of the soldier, the Shikari, 
the man of the vrorld and the Arab combined, to leave him 
anything whatever of the poet or the dreamer. Men of 
action may have grave, but they never have visionary 
thoughts, and life with Erceldoune was too gallant, strong, 
and rapid a stream — ever in incessant motion, though calm 
enough, as deep waters mostly are — to leave him leisure or 
inclination to loiter lingeringly or dreamily upon its banks. 
Reflection was habitual to him, imagination was alien to 
him. 

By midnight he reached Paris, and left his dispatches at 
the English Embassy. There was no intense pressure of 
haste to get Turin-wards so long as he was in the far 
Eastern Principalities by the Friday, and he waited for 
the early mail train to the South, instead of taking a spe- 
cial one, as he would otherwise have done, to get across 
the Alps. If a few hours were left under own his control in 
a city, Erceldoune never slept them away ; he slept in a rail- 
way carriage, a traveling carriage, on deck, in a. desert, on 
a raft rushing down some broad river that made the only 
highway through Bulgarian or Roumelian forests— any- 


HAYING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 


31 


where where novelty, discomfort, exposure, or danger would 
have been likely to banish sleep from most men ; but in a 
city he neglected it with an independence of that necessity 
of life which is characteristic of the present day. There is 
a cafe, whether in the Rue Lafitte, Rivoli, Castiglione, or 
La Faix, matters not ; here, in the great gilded salon, with 
its innumerable mirrors and consoles and little oval tables, 
or in the little cabinets, with their rosewood and gilding, 
and green velvet and rose satin, if there be a bouquet to 
be tossed down on the marble slab, and the long eyes of a 
Laura or Aglae to flash over the wines, while a pretty 
painted fan taps an impatient rataplan or gives a soft blow 
on the ear — may be found after midnight a choice but he- 
terogeneous gathering. Secretaries of all the legations, 
Queen’s messengers, Charivari writers, Eastern travelers, 
great feuilletonists, great artists, princes if they have any 
wit beneath their purples, authors of any or all nations — 
all, in a word, that is raciest, witti<&t, and, in their own 
sense, most select in Paris, are to be met with at the Cafe 
Minuit, if you be of the initiated. If you be not, you may 
enter the cafe of course, since it is open to all the world, 
and sup there off what you will, but you will still remain 
virtually outside it. 

Erceldoune was well known here : it is in such republics 
only that a man is welcomed for what he is, and what he 
has done — not for what he is worth. He was as renowned 
in Paris because he was so utterly unlike the Parisians, 
as he was renowned in the East because he so closely re- 
sembled the Arabs; and he entered the Cafe Minuit for 
the few hours which lay between his arrival at the Embassy 
and his departure for Turin. 

None of his own special set had dropped in just then; 
indeed, there were but few of them in Paris. As he sat at 
his accustomed table, glancing through a journal, and with 
the light from the gaselier above shed full on his face — a 
face better in unison with drooping desert-palms, and a 
gleaming stand of rifles, and the dusky glow of a deep sun- 
set on Niger or on Nile, for its setting and background, 
than with the gilt arabesques and florid hues and white gas- 
light of a French cafe — a new-comer, who had entered 
shortly afterward and seated himself at the same table, 


32 


IDALIA. 


addressed him on some topic of the hour, and pushed him 
an open ease of some dainty scented cigarettes. 

Erceldoune courteously declined them; he always 
smoked his own Turkish tobacco, and would as soon 
have used cosmetiques as perfumed cigars; and answering 
the remark, looked at the speaker. He was accustomed 
to read men thoroughly and rapidly, even if they carried 
their passports in cipher. What he saw opposite him was 
a magnificently made man, with a face of most picturesque 
and brilliant beauty, of a purely foreign type, with the 
eyes long, dark, and melting, and features perfectly cut as 
any cameo’s — a man who might have sat to a painter for 
Lamoral d’Egmont, or for one of Fra - Moreale’s reckless 
nobly-born Free Lances; and might have passed for five- 
and-thirty at the most, till he who should have looked 
closely at the lines in the rich reckless beauty, and caught 
a certain look in the lustrous half-veiled eyes, would have 
allotted him, justly, fifteen full years more. 

Erceldoune gave him one glance, and though there was 
little doubt about his type and his order, he had known 
men of both by the hundreds. 

“ Paris is rather empty, monsieur? Sapristi I The as- 
phalte in August would be too much for a salamander,” 
pursued the stranger, over his bouillabaisse. He spoke 
excellent French, with a mellifluous southern accent, not 
of France. 

Erceldoune assented. Like all travelers or men used 
to the world, he liked a stranger full as well as a friend for 
a companion — perhaps rather the better; but he was nat- 
urally silent, and seldom spoke much, save when strongly 
moved or much prepossessed by those whom he conversed 
with ; then he would be eloquent enough, but that was 
rare. 

“ Thousands come to Paris this time of the year, but 
only to pass through it, as I dare say you are doing yourself, 
monsieur?” went on the Greek, if such he were, as Ercel- 
doune judged him by the eyes and the features, worthy of 
Phidias’s chisel, rarely seen without some Hellenic blood. 

“ For the season the city is tolerably full ; travelers 
keep it so, as you say,” answered Erceldoune, who was 
never to be entrapped into talking of himself. 


HAYING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 


33 


“ It is a great mistake for people to travel in flocks, like 
swallows and sheep,” said his vivacious neighbor, whose 
manners were very careless, graceful, and thoroughly pol- 
ished, if they had a dash of the Bohemian, the Adven- 
turer, and the Free Lance. “A terrible mistake ! Over- 
crowds the inns, the steamers, and the railway carriages; 
thins the soups, doubles the price of wines, and teaches 
guides to look on themselves as luxuries, to be paid for 
accordingly; makes a Nile sunset ridiculous by being wit- 
nessed by a mob; and turns Luxor and Jupiter Ammon 
into dust and prose by having a tribe of donkeys and 
dragomen rattled over their stones I A fearful mistake ! 
If you are social and gregarious, stay in a city; but if 
you are speculative and Ishmaelesque, travel in solitude. 
Eh, monsieur?” 

“ If you can find it. But you have to travel far to get 
into solitudes in these days. Have you seen this evening’s 
Times?” 

“A thousand thanks 1 Wonderful thing, your Times! 
Does the work in England that secret police do in Vienna, 
spies and bayonets do here, and confetti to the populace 
and galleys to the patriots do in Rome.” 

“ Scarcely ! The Times would rather say it prevents 
England’s having need of any of those continental argu- 
ments,” said Erceldoune, as he tossed the brandy into his 
coffee. 

The other laughed, as from under his lashes he flashed 
a swift glance at the Queen’s Messenger. He would have 
preferred it if there had been less decision about the broad, 
bold, frank brow, and less power in the length of limb 
stretched out, and the supple wrist as it lay resting on the 
marble slab of the cafe table. 

“ Basta ! Governments should give the people plenty 
to eat and pleuty to laugh at ; they would never be trou- 
bled with insurrections then, or hear anything more about 
‘liberty!’ A sleek, well-fed, happy fellow never turned 
patriot yet; he who { takes a dagger for his country only 
takes it because he lias no loaf of bread to cut with it, or 
feels inclined to slit his own throat ! Make corn and meat 
cheap, and you may play tyrant as you like.” 

“A sound policy, and a very simple one:” 

C 


34 


ID ALIA. 


“All sound things are simple, monsieur ! It is the sham 
and rotten ones that want an intricate scaffolding to keep 
them from falling; the perfect arch stands without gird- 
ers. ‘ Panem et Circenses’ will always be the first article 
of good governments; when the people are in good humor 
they never seethe into malcontents . 77 

“ Then I suppose you would hold that cheap provis- 
ions and low taxes would make us hear no more of 
the present cry of ‘nationalities 7 ? 77 Ilis companion was 
piquant in his discourse and polished in his style, but he 
did not particularly admire him ; and when he did not ad- 
mire people, he had a way of holding them at arm’s 
length. 

“ 1 Nationalities ? 7 Ridiculous prejudices! Myths that 
would die to-morrow, only ministers like to keep a handy 
reason on the shelf to make a raid on their neighbor, or 
steal an inch or two of frontier when the spirit moves 
them , 77 laughed the other, and his laugh was a soft silvery 
chime, very pleasant to the ear. “ Pooh ! a man’s nation- 
alities are where he gets the best wage and the cheapest 
meat, specially in these prosaic profoundly-practical times, 
when there is no chivalry, no dash, no color; when the 
commonplace thrives; when we turn Egyptian mummies 
into railway fuel, and find PharaolPs dust make a roaring 
fire ; when we make crocuses into veratrin for our sore- 
throats, and violets into sweet-meats for our eating ! A 
detestable age, truly. Fancy the barbarism of crystalliz- 
ing and crunching a violet ! The flower of Clemence 
Isaure, and all the poets after her, condemned to the deg- 
radation of becoming a bonbon ! Can anything be more 
typical of the prosaic atrocity of this age ? Impossible ! 77 

“ With such acute feelings, you must find the dinner- 
card excessively restricted. With so much sympathy for 
a violet, what must be your philanthropy for a pheasant !’* 
said Erceldoune, quietly, who was not disposed to pursue 
the Monody of a Violet in the Cafe Minuit, though the 
man to a certain extent amused him. 

At that moment the foreigner rose a little hastily, left 
his ice-cream unfinished, and, with a gay, graceful adieu, 
went out of the salon, which was now filling. “A hand- 
some fellow, and talks well , 77 thought Erceldoune, wring- 


HAVING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 


35 


ing the amber Moselle from bis long moustaches, when he 
was left alone at the marble table in the heat, and light, 
and movement of the glittering cafe. “I know the fra- 
ternity well enough, and he is one of the best of the mem- 
bers, I dare say. He did not waste much of his science 
on me ; he saw it would be profitless work. On my word, 
the wit and ability and good manners those men fritter 
away in their order would make them invaluable in a 
Chancellerie and fit them for any State office in the 
world. ” 

The First Secretary of the English Legation and a 
French diplomatist entered and claimed his attention at 
that instant, and he gave no more thought to the cham- 
pion of the crystallized violets, whom, justly or wrongly 
as it might chance, he had classed with the renowned Le- 
gion of Chevaliers d’Industrie, and whose somewhat ab- 
rupt departure he had attributed either to his own lack of 
promise as a plausible subject for experimentalizing upon, 
or to the appearance on the scene of some mouchard of 
the Secret Bureau, whom the vivacious bewailer of the 
fate of sugared flowers in this age of prose did not care to 
encounter. 

Erceldoune thought no more of him then and thencefor- 
ward ; he would have thought more had the mirrors of the 
Cafe Minuit been Paracelsus’s or Agrippa’s mirours of 
grammarye. 

The long console-glass, with its curled gas-branches and 
its rose-hewed draperies, and its reflex of the gilding, the 
glitter, the silver, the damask, the fruit, the wines, and the 
crowds of the Paris cafe, would have been darkened with 
night-shadows and deep forest foliage, and the tumult of 
close struggles for life or death, and the twilight hush of 
cloistered aisles, and the rich glow of Eastern waters, and 
the silent gloom of ancient God-forgotten cities ; and, from 
out the waving, shadowy, changing darkness of all, there 
would have looked a woman’s face, with fathomless, lumi- 
nous eyes, and hair with a golden light upon it, and a 
proud, weary, sorceress smile on the lips— the face of a 
temptress or of an angel ? 

But the mirror had no magic of the future; the glass 
reflected nothing save the gas-jets of the ormolu sconces, 


36 


IDALIA. 


and Fulke Erceldoune sat there in Paris that night, 
drinking his iced Rhine wines, and smoking his curled 
Arabian meerschaum, knowing nothing of what lay before 
him, a blind wanderer in the twilight, a traveler in strange 
countries, as we are at best in life. 


CHAPTER III. 

SOUFFItlR EN RO I, 

Heayen forbid that the Principalities should be better 
governed : they would be like all the rest of the world in 
no time. They may be ruinous to themselves very prob- 
ably, and a nest of internecine discord for Eastern Europe ; 
but they are delightful for the stranger, and the bird of 
passage should surely have one solitude left wherein to find 
rest; regions where the refined tortures of the post cannot 
reach ; where debts can be defied and forgotten across the 
stretch of those dense pine-woods which sever you from the 
rest of mankind ; where the only highway to your quarters 
is a rapid surging river, with a timber-raft drifting down 
it; where, whirled along by gipsy horses and gipsy drivers 
through vast wooded tracks, you halt and wake with a pleas- 
ant wonder to find yourself in the broad streets and squares 
of a populous city, of which, though you are not more geo- 
graphically ignorant than your brethren, you had not the 
haziest notion, and whose very name you do not know when 
you hear it, waking at the cessation of the horses’ gallop 
and the gipsy Jehu’s shouts, to open your eyes upon the 
clear Moldavian or Wallachian night, with the sound of 
music from some open casement above. Regions such as 
these are the Principalities, and who would not keep them 
so, from the Danube to the Dneister, from the Straits of 
Otranto to the Euxine, for the refuge of necessitous wan- 
derers who have an inconvenient connection, a tiresome run 
upon them from the public, or a simple desire for a para- 


SOUFFRIR EN ROl. 


31 


disc where a woman will not follow them, where letters will 
not come, where the game districts are unbeaten, and the 
deep woods and wild valleys as yet unsketched and unsung*/ 

Through the Principalities, Erceldoune traveled in as 
brief a time, from the early dawn when he had left Paris, 
as mail trains, express specials, rapid relays of horses, and 
swift river passages could take him, across Tyrol and Ve- 
netia, Alps and Carpathians, Danube and Drave, calling 
at Belgrade with dispatches, and pushing straight on for 
Moldavia. Every mile of that wild and unworn way was 
as familiar to the Queen’s Messenger as the journey between 
London and Paris is familiar to other men. Where steam 
had not yet penetrated, and there was no choice but be- 
tween posting and the saddle, he usually rode ; if the roads 
were level, and the route unsightly, he would take the lux- 
urious rest of a “ Messenger’s carriage,” and post through 
the nights and days ; but, by preference, hard riding car- 
ried him over most of his ground, with pace and stay that 
none in the service could equal, and which had made the 
Arabs, when their horses swept beside his through the 
eastern sunlight, toss their lances aloft, and shout “Fazziaf 
Fazzia /” with applause to the Giaour. He rode so now, 
when, having passed direct from Belgrade across the lower 
angle of Transylvania, and crossed the Carpathian range, 
he found himself fairly set toward Moldavia, with only a 
hundred miles or so more left between him and Jassy, which 
was his destination. 

The Principality was in a ferment; Church and civil 
power were in conflict and rivalry; England, France, Aus- 
tria, and Russia were all disturbing themselves after the 
affairs of this out-of-the-way nook, conceiving that with 
Greece in insurrection, and Italy in a transition state, and 
Poland quivering afresh beneath her bonds, even Moldavia 
might be the match to a European conflagration, and open 
up the scarce- healed Eastern question; and an English 
envoy was then at Jassy, charged with a special mission, to 
whom the dispatches which Erceldoune bore carried spe- 
cial instructions, touching on delicate matters of moment 
to the affairs of central and eastern Europe, and to the 
part which would be played by Great Britain in the event 
of the freedom of the southern States, and the success of the 

4 


38 


ID ALIA. 


liberal party in Athens, Hungary, or Yenetia. This one 
bag, with the arms of England on the seal, and the all-im- 
portant instructions within, was all that lie carried now, 
slung round his neck and across his chest by an undressed 
belt of chamois leather. He was wholly alone ; his mount- 
ain guides he had dismissed at the foot of the Carpathians, 
for he had gone through the most dangerous defiles and 
thief-invested passes all over the world, caring for no other 
defense than lay in his holster pistols. He had been stopped 
two or three times, once by the “Bail-up !” of Tasmanian 
bushrangers, once by a Ghoorka gang in Northern India, 
once by a chieftain who levied black mail in the rocky 
fastnesses of Macedonia, — but his shots had always cleared 
him a passage through, and he had ridden on with no more 
loss than the waste of powder and ball. He was too well 
known, moreover, in both hemispheres, to be molested, and 
the boldest hill-robbers would have cared as little to come 
to close quarters with one whose strength had become pro- 
verbial, as to get themselves into trouble by tampering 
with the State courier of a great power. 

It had been a splendid day in the young autumn, and it 
was just upon its close as he went through the forests, his 
mare, a pure-bred sorrel, scarcely touching the ground, as 
she swept along, swift as a greyhound or a lapwing. The 
air was heavily scented with the fragrance of the firs ; the 
last lingering rays of light slanted here and there across 
the moss through dark fanlike boughs, cone-laden; aisles 
of pines stretched in endless and innumerable lines of paths 
scarce ever trodden save by the wolf, or the wild boar, or 
the charcoal-burner, barely more human than the brute ; 
and, in the rear, to the westward, towered the Carpathians, 
with their black rugged sides reared in the purple sunset, 
the guard of the Magyar fatherland. 

Now and then, at rare intervals, a little hamlet buried 
in the recesses of the forest, whose few wretched women 
wore the Turkish yashmak, spoke of Moldavia, or he came 
on a camp of naked wild-eyed gipsies of the country; but 
as evening closed in, and Erceldoune advanced into a nar- 
row rocky defile, the nearest passage through dense pine 
solitudes, even these signs of human life in its most brutal- 
ized phase, ceased wholly. There was only the rapid ring 


80UFFRIR EN ROI. 


39 


of his mare’s hoofs, given back by a thousand hollow echoes, 
as he swept down the ravine, with high precipitous walls 
of rock rising on either side, while the river thundered and 
foamed beside him, and the trees closing above head made 
it well-nigh dark as night, though beyond, the summits of 
the Hungarian range were still lit by the last rays of the 
sun gleaming golden on eternal snows. Sitting down in 
his saddle, with his eyes glancing, rapid and unerring as a 
soldier’s, on either side where the shelving rocks sloped 
upward in the gloom, Ereeldoune dashed along the defile 
at a pace such as the blood horses of the desert reach — the 
surging of the torrent at his side, the winds rising loud and 
stormy among the black pine-boughs above, the intense 
stillness and solitude around, that are only felt in the depths 
of a forest or the hush of a mountain-side. 

These were what he loved in his life: these nights and 
days of loneliness, of action, of freedom, alone with all that 
was wildest and grandest in nature, under no law but the 
setting and rising of the sun, riding onward, without check 
or pause, a fresh horse ready saddled when the jaded one 
drooped and slackened; these were what suited the pas- 
sionate need of liberty, the zest to do and dare, the eagle- 
love of solitude ingrained in his Border-blood, and as latent 
in him as in the chieftains of his name when they had borne 
fire and sword far away into stout Northumberland, or har- 
ried the Marches in their King’s defiance. 

The pressure of his knees sufficing for her guidance with- 
out curb or spur, the sorrel scoured the winding ravine, 
fleet and sure of foot, as though the rocky and irregular 
ground had been a level stretch of sward, her ears pointed, 
her pace like the wind, all the blood and mettle there were 
in her roused; she knew her master in her rider. Dashing 
onward through the gloom thus, suddenly his hand checked 
her; his eyes had seen what hers had not. Thrown back 
on her haunches in the midst of her breathless gallop, she 
reared in snorting terror; any other she might have hurled 
senseless to the earth; he sat as motionless as though horse 
and man were cast together in bronze. 

Across the narrow and precipitous path lay the felled 
trunk of a pine, blocking the way. She rose erect, and 
stood so for a second, her rider in his saddle firm as on a 


40 


ID ALIA. 


rock — a sculptor would have given ten years of his life to 
have caught and fixed that magnificent attitude; — then 
down she came with a crash on her fore feet, while from 
the black barricade of the leveled pine, through the thick 
screen of stiffened branches, came the gleam of half a dozen 
rifles, the long lean barrels glistening in the twilight. 

The brigands lay in ambush waiting him; and the hoarse 
shout of arrest was pealed back by the echoes. 

“Your papers — or we fire!” 

And the steel muzzles covered him front and rear, while 
the challenge rang out down the vault of the hollowed 
rocks. 

Swiftly as lightning his eyes swept over the leveled rifles 
and numbered them — eight against one ; rapidly as the 
wind he drew his pistol from his holster and fired among 
them ; a shrill shriek pierced the air, a man reeled head- 
long down into the gorge of the river foaming below, and 
without breath, without pause, Erceldoune put the bay at the 
leap, trusting the rest to her hunter’s blood, and facing the 
leveled death-dealers full in the front. The gallant beast 
deserved his faith ; she rose point-blank at the barricade, 
and leapt with one mighty bound the great pine-barrier 
and the glittering line of steel. She landed safe ; — a second, 
and he would have raced onward, distancing all shot and 
defying all pursuit; but with a yell that rang from rock to 
rock, the murderous barrels she had overleapt and cleared, 
covered her afresh; the sharp crack of the shots echoed 
through the pass, three balls pierced her breast and flanks, 
bedding themselves where the life lay, and with a scream 
of piteous agony she threw her head upward, swayed to 
and fro an instant, and fell beneath him — dead. He sprang 
from the saddle ere her weight could crush him, and, with 
his back against the ledge of granite, turned at bay; hope 
he had not, succor there could be none in those dense 
mountain solitudes, those wastes of vast unpeopled pine- 
woods ; in that hour he had but one thought — to sell his 
life dearly, and to deserve his country’s trust. 

The echoes of the conflict rang in quick succession on 
the stillness, thundered back by the reverberations of the 
hills ; it was hot, close, mortal work in that narrow choked 
defile; Erceldoune, with his back against the granite, and 


SOUFFRIR EN ROI. 


41 


his dead bay at his feet between him and his foes, had the 
strength and the fury of a legion, now that his wrath was 
up in all its might, and the blood-thirst wakened in him. 
A ball broke his right arm above the wrist; it fell useless 
at his side. He laughed aloud : 

“Blunderers ! why don’t you hit through the lungs?” 

And as he changed his pistol into his left hand, he 
raised it, and the man who had shot him fell with a crash 
— a bullet through his brain. He could not load again ; 
his arm was broken ; and the hoarse yell of men, infuri- 
ated to be defied, and exasperated at their comrades’ loss, 
told him his minutes were numbered, as one cry alone 
grated on the night air from many voices ; in Romaic, in 
French, in Venetian, in Hungarian ; — varied tongues, but 
one summons alone. 

“ Your papers or your life 1 Death, or surrender !” 

There was a moment’s hush and pause ; they waited for 
their menace to do their work without the bloodshed that 
they shirked, from caution and from wisdom, rather than 
from humanity; and at that instant the moon, shed 
through one break in the black pine roofing above head, 
poured its light through the pass. Round him in a half 
circle, broken from their barricade and ambush now that 
his fire was spent, pressed his assassins, their faces masked 
by the crape drawn over them, their rifles covering him 
with pitiless purpose. With his right arm hanging pow- 
erless, and the mare lying at his feet, the sole barrier be- 
tween him and the cross- fire leveled at him, stood Ercel- 
doune, reared to his full height motionless as though he 
were a statue. 

“ Death, or surrender !” 

The summons hissed through the silence with a deadly 
meaning, a hoarse snarl such as the hounds give when the 
stag holds them too long at bay. Erceldoune stood erect, 
his eyes glancing calmly down on the semicircle of the 
long shining lines of steel, each of whose hollow tubes car- 
ried his death-warrant ; a look upon his face before which 
the boldest, though they held his life in their hands and at 
their mercy, quailed ; he knew how he should save his 
trust and his papers, though he knew that his life must 
pay the forfeit. He calmly watched the leveled rifles, and 


42 


IDALIA. 


a half smile passed over his face ; — they had brought eight 
against one — it was a distinction, at least, to take so much 
killing. 

“ The devil will never give in !” swore with savage Hun- 
garian oaths the farthest of the band. “ Seize him, and 
bind him ! — we don’t want his blood.” 

“Take the papers, and gag him. Carl is right; we 
want them, not him,” muttered another, in whose southern 
German the keen ear of him whose life they balanced 
caught the foreign accent of a Gallican. 

Oue who seemed the leader of the gang laughed — a 
rolling, mellow, harmonious laugh, which thrilled through 
the blood of Erceldoune as menace and challenge had 
never done ; he had heard it a few nights before in the 
gaslit salon of the Parisian cafe.' 

“ Basta, basta ! ‘Too many words, my masters.’ Kill 
the Border Eagle and strip him afterward I His beak 
won’t peck when he’s shot down !” 

“ Stop — stop 1” muttered a milder Sicilian. “ Give him 
his choice; we only want the dispatches.” 

“The papers then, or we lire !” 

The moon shone clearer and whiter down into the ra- 
vine, while they pressed nearer and nearer till the half cir- 
cle of steel glittered close against him within a yard of his 
breast; — and the Greek who in the Cafe Minuit had la- 
mented so softly the prosaic fate of the violet bonbons, 
pressed closest of all. He stood quietly, with no change 
in his attitude, and his broken wrist dripping blood on the 
stone at his feet; the dark scorn of fiery passions had low- 
ered on his face, stormy, dangerous, menacing as the wrath 
that lightens up a lion’s eyes, while on his lips was a laugh 
— a laugh for the coward caution of his assassins, the wo- 
manish cruelty which compassed him with such timorous 
might of numbers, fearing one man unarmed and wounded 1 

“ Death, or surrender !” 

The cry echoed again, loud and hoarse now as the 
hounds’ bay, baffled and getting furious for blood. 

His back was reared against the rock; his left arm 
pressed against his breast, holding to him the seals that 
were his trust ; his eyes looked down upon them steadily 
as he answered : 


SOUEFRXR EN ROI. 


43 


“ Fire !” 

And while his voice, calm and unfaltering, gave the 
word of command for his own death- volley, with a swift 
sudden gesture, unlooked for and unarrested by them, he 
lifted his left hand, and hurled far away through the 
gloom, till they sank with a loud splash into the bed of 
the swollen rushing river, the white bag of the English 
dispatches; — lost forever in the deep gorge, and whirled 
on into darkness with the passage of foaming waters, 
where no spy could reach and no foe could rob them. 

Then, as the ravenous yell of baffled force and infuri- 
ated passion shook the echoes of the hills, the report of the 
rifles rang through the night with sullen murderous peal, 
and Erceldoune fell as one dead. 

All was still in the heart of the forest. 

The snowy summits of the Carpathians gleamed white 
in the moonlight ; the cry of the wild dog or the growl of 
the wild boar, the screech of the owl or the rush of the 
bat’s wing, alone broke the silence; above the dark silent 
earth the skies were cloudless, and studded with countless 
stars, whose radiance glistened here and there through 
dense black shadow, on moss, and boulders, and cavernous 
gorges, and torrents plunging downward through the 
night. In the narrow channel of the defile, with gnarled 
pines above and waters roaring in their pent-up bed below, 
there lay the stiffened corpse of the mare, and across her 
body, bathed in her blood and in his own, with his head 
fallen back, and his face turned upward as the starlight 
fell upon it, was stretched the Queen’s Messenger, where 
they had left him for dead. 

The night had passed on and the hours stolen apace, till 
the stars had grown large in the heavens, and the morn- 
ing planet risen in the east before the dawn ; and he had 
lain there, as lifeless and motionless as the sorrel beneath 
him, through all the watches of the night which parted 
the sunset of one day from the daybreak of the next. His 
right arm, broken and nerveless, was flung across the neck 
of the mare, as though his last thought as he fell had been 
of the brute friend whom he had lost, and who had died 
for him ; the blood had poured from a deep chest wound, 


44 


ID ALIA. 


till the black velvet of his riding coat was soaked through 
and through, and the mosses and the grasses were dyed 
with the stream that bore his life away; his face was stern 
yet serene, like many faces of the dead upon a battle-field, 
and only a deep-drawn labored breath, that quivered at 
long intervals through all his frame, showed that existence 
had not wholly ceased with the murderous volley which 
had brought him to the earth, as his own shot had brought 
the kingly fearless strength of the golden eagle reeling 
downward to his fate. Either the aim of his assassins had 
been uncertain from the fury with which they had leveled 
and fired when they had seen their errand baffled, and the 
dispatches flung beyond all reach into the mountain gorge, 
or they had been blinded by the flickering shadows of the 
moon, and the lust of their vengeance on him, for two 
shots alone had touched him out of the five which had 
been fired at him. One ball had pierced his breast, and 
brought him down senseless, and, to all semblance, life- 
less; it had been aimed by the leader of the band who 
had trifled with his ice, and mourned over the conserve of 
violets in Paris a few nights before. The other bullet, 
which had struck him in the chest, and would have cut its 
way straight through the lungs, had been turned aside by 
the solid silver of his meerschaum, in whose bowl the ball 
was bedded, though the force of its concussion would have 
stretched him insensible without a wound. He had fallen 
as one dead, and they had left him for such in the narrow 
defile, hastening themselves to leave the pine forest far be- 
hind them, and put the range of the Carpathians between 
them and Moldavia, taking their own wounded with them, 
and plunging into the recesses of the woods, where all 
pursuit could be baffled, all detection defied. Whether 
they were mountain banditti, or masked nobles, or insur- 
gent conspirators, those vast solitudes would never reveal, 
since the deed would tell no tales and bear no witness; his 
assassination, if ever known, would be traced, they deemed, 
to gipsies or charcoal burners, while the odds were a mil- 
lion to one that the fate of the English State courier 
would never be heard of, but remain in the shroud of an 
impenetrable mystery, while he lay in the lonely and un- 
trodden ravine, till the bears and the vultures left his bones 


SOUFFRIR EN ROI. 


45 


to whiten unburied when they had sated their hunger on 
the sinewy limbs of the man who had fallen to avoid the 
surrender of his honor and his trust. 

Darkness closes thus over the fate of many; he is “miss- 
ing,” and we know no more. 

Nearly lifeless thus, Erceldoune had remained through 
the long hours where his assassins had left him; about him 
only the shrieking of the owls, the sough of the winds 
among the pines, and the distant roar of the beasts of prey, 
to whom his enemies had trusted for the completion and 
the burial of their work. Weaker men would have suc- 
cumbed to lp«s danger than he had often brooked and 
passed through seathless ; and even now the athletic strength 
within him refused to perish. The flowing of the blood 
had stopped, a labored sigh now and then gave sign of 
vitality, though not of consciousness; then, as the night 
was waning, a shudder ran through all his frame, and his 
eyes unclosed, looking upward, without light or sense, to 
the starlit vault above. 

He remembered nothing. 

The deep skies and “the stars in their courses” whirled 
giddily above him ; the pine-boughs flickered in phantom 
shapes before his sight ; the sounds of the winds and of 
the falling torrents smote dully on his ear ; he had no sense 
but of suffocation from the congealed blood upon his chest, 
and the sharp agony of every breath; he wondered dimly, 
dreamily, who he was, and where he lay. An intense thirst 
parched his throat and oppressed his lungs — a thirst he 
suffered from without knowing what the torture could be — 
and the plunge and splash of the cascades in the gorge 
below filled his brain with vague thronging images of cool 
still lakes, of rushing brooks, of deep brown tarns among 
his native moorlands, and through them all he stood ever 
up to the lips in the cold delicious waters, yet ever power- 
less to stoop and taste one drop ! The sweep of a night- 
bird’s wing touched his forehead as it flew low under the 
drooped pine-branches; at the touch consciousness slowly 
and confusedly awoke; the night ceased to whirl round 
him in a chaos of shadow, the planets grew clear and fa^ 
miliar, and looked down on him from the dizzy mists cir- 
cling above. By sheer instinct he sought to raise his right 


46 


ID ALIA. 


bund ; it was powerless, and as he stretched out his left 
arm he felt the chill stiffened body of his lost mare, and 
the grasses wet with her blood and his own ; then thought 
and recollection awoke from the mists of death, and he 
remembered all. 

He knew that he was lying there wounded unto death, 
beyond all appeal for aid, ail hope of succor, powerless 
to drive from him the frailest insect that with the morning 
light should begin the fell work of corruption and destruc- 
tion, alone in his last hour in the desolation of the Carpa- 
thians, with no companion save the beast of prey, no 
watcher but the carrion kite. 

Dread of death he had never known ; there was no such 
coward weakness in him now, in his worst extremity, when 
he knew that he was dying in the best years of his man- 
hood, slaughtered by the baseness of treacherous assassi- 
nation, alone in the pent defile where his murder had been 
planned, and where no human step would ever come, ex- 
cept it were that of some mountain plunderer, who would 
strip off the linen and the velvet that the birds of prey 
would have left untouched, while his bones should lie there 
through summer drought and winter storm unburied, un- 
lamented, unavenged. Fear was not on him even now in 
his dying hour, but a mortal sense of loneliness that his life 
had never known stole over him as he wakened in the hush 
of the forest night, paralyzed, powerless, strengthless, felled 
in his full force, slain, like the golden eagle, by a single 
shot. The heavens, studded with their stars, looked chill 
and pitiless; the rocks towered upward in the moonlight, 
shutting him out from all the peopled slumbering world ; 
no sound smote the stillness save the distant sullen moan 
of the brutes seeking their prey, and the winds sweeping 
and wailing through the endless aisles of pines; — he died 
in solitude. 

The night wore on ; a profound and awful silence reigned 
around, only broken by the growl of wolves or the scream 
of foxes from their distant haunts ; the ravening cry borne 
on the blast of those who, with each second which passed 
away, might scent blood from afar off, and track it in their 
hunger, and come down to rend, and tear, and devour, 
finishing the work of slaughter. He heard that sullen bay 


SOUFFRIR EN ROI. 


47 


all through the night where he lay, across the dead mare 
motionless; he could not have stirred a limb, though the 
fangs of the wild boar had been at his throat, or the wolves 
in a troop been upon him. Hope or thought of succor he 
had none ; he was in the deep heart of the mountains, where 
none could come; and he knew too well the lore of desert 
and camp not to know that all chance of life was over, that 
his last hour was here, and that if the vulture and the bear 
did not track him out he would die of the loss of blood 
alone; or that if his frame bore up against the exhaustion 
of his wounds through the day which would soon dawn, he 
would perish but the more slowly, and the more agon- 
izingly, of famine and of thirst. 

Time wore on ; the stars grew large as the morning drew 
near, and his eyes gazed upward at them where he lay in 
the pass of the defile ; a thousand nights on southern seas, 
in tropic lands, in eastern aisles of palm, through phosphor- 
glittering waters while his ship cleft her way, through the 
white gleam of snow steppes while the sleigh bells chimed, 
through the torchlit glades of forests while the German 
boar or the French stag was hunted to his lair, drifted to 
memory as the moon shone down on him through the break 
in the massed pine-boughs ; — for he had ever loved the 
mere sense and strength of life ; all 

. . “the wild joys of living, the leaping from rock to rock, 

The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool river shock 
Of a plunge in a pool’s living water, — the hunt of the bear, 

And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.” 

And he knew that this glory was dead in him forever; and 
that when those stars rose on another night, and shed their 
brightness upon earth and ocean, forest and sea, his eyes 
would be blind to their light and behold them no more, 
since he should be stricken out from the world of the living. 

At last, — it seemed that an eternity had come and gone. — • 
the day reached him, dawning from the splendor of Asia 
far away. 

The light streamed in the east, the darkness of the shad- 
ows was broken by the first rays of warmth, the night- 
birds fled to their roost, and above the clouds rose the sun, 
bathing the sleeping world in its golden gladness, and 


48 


IPALIA. 


shining full on the snow peaks of the mountains. Tho 
forest life awoke; the song of countless birds rose on the 
silence, the hum of myriad insects murmured beneath the 
grasses, the waters of innumerable torrents glistened in the 
sunbeams; — and, alone in the waking and rejoicing world, 
he lay, dying. 

About him, where never sunlight came, were dank grasses, 
and the gloomy foliage of pines, but above head, far aloft 
through the walls of granite, was the blue and cloudless 
sky of a summer dawn. His eyes looked upward to it 
heavily, and with the film gathering fast over them; in his 
physical anguish, in his sore extremity, there were still 
beauty and solace in the day. 

Yet as he gazed, the heavens were darkened, the sunlit 
morning became more loathsome than all the solitude and 
darkness of the night; wakened in the dawn and poised in 
air, drawn thither by the scent of blood, he saw the flocks 
of carrion-birds, the allies whom the assassins trusted to 
destroy all trace of their work, the keepers of the vigil of 
the dead. Cleaving the air and wheeling in the light, they 
gathered there, vulture and kite, raven and rock-eagle, 
coming with the sunrise to their carrion feast, sweeping 
downward into the defile with shrill and hideous clamor 
till they alit beside him, in their ravenous greed, upon the 
body of the mare, striking their beaks into her eyes and 
whetting their taste in her flesh, rending and lacerating, 
and disputing their prey. 

Thus he had seen them, many a time, making their feast 
on the lion or camel of the East ; and a sickness of loathing 
came upon him, and a horror unutterable; — bound in the 
bonds of death, and powerless to lift his arm against them, 
he must wait, half living and half dead, while these hungry 
hordes tore at his heart. 

A cry broke from him, loud and terrible — a shout for 
help, where help there could be none. Its echo pealing 
from the rocks, scared and scattered the ravening birds 
one instant from their lust; they wheeled and circled in the 
sunlit air, then settled once more on their spoil. 

A single vulture, driven from the rest, poised above him 
— waiting. Looking upward, he saw the bird, with its 
dark wings outstretched, sailing in rings round and round 


“NTnES YOUS PAS DU PARADIS?” 


43 


ip the sunlight glare, impatient and athirst, it3 glittering 
eyes fixed on him — the watcher and the harbinger of death. 

By the sheer force of animal instinct, strength for the 
moment was restored ; he sprang up to drive from off him 
the murderous beak that would seek his life blood, the car- 
rion-greed that would wrench out his eyes while yet they 
saw the day ! He leapt forward, striking wildly and 
blindly at the black shadow of the hovering bird; at the 
action the wound opened, the hemorrhage broke out afresh 
—he fell back senseless. 


CHAPTER IV. 

"N’ETES YOUS PAS DU PARADIS?” 

Even in the silent heart of the Carpathian woods two 
had heard that shout of mortal extremity. 

They were but a woman and a wolf-hound, resting 
together under the shade of the pines higher up, where 
the head of the torrent tumbled and splashed from rock to 
rock, its sheet of foam glittering in the warmth of the 
risen day. They heard it ; — and the woman rose with a 
stag-like grace of terror, blent with a haughty challenge of 
such weakness, and the dog, with his bristling mane erect, 
and his head lifted in the air, woke the echoes with a 
deep-mouthed bay. Both listened — all was still ; — then 
she laid her hand on the hound’s shaggy coat, and gave 
him a single word of command. He waited, sniffing the 
scent borne to him on the wind, then, with his muzzle to 
the earth, sprang off; she followed him; the lights ana 
shadows from the pine-boughs above flung, flickering and 
golden, on her uncovered hair ; a woman fair as the morn- 
ing, with the free imperial step of the forest deer, and the 
beauty of the classic and glorious south ; the beauty of 
Aspasia of Athens, of Lucrezia of Rome ; 

D 5 


50 


IDxlLIA. 


A few short seconds, and the hound plunged down into 
the pass, baying loud in fear and fury, as though he tracked 
the trail of the crime. The birds flew up with whirling 
tumult from their meal, and wheeled aloft, scared and 
scattered; the vulture that had her talons tangled in the 
hair of the fallen man, and was stretching her plumed 
throat to deal her first aim at his sightless eyes, taking 
wing slowly, leaving her prey reluctantly. The woman 
fell on her knees beside him where he lay across the body 
of his slaughtered mare, as lifeless to all semblance as the 
animal. 

She knew that she was in the presence of crime, and 
she believed herself in that of death ; this man had been 
slain foully in the heart of the forest, and she was alone, in 
the mountain ravine that had seen the guilt done and the 
blow dealt, alone with one whom his enemies had left to 
perish and lie unburied for the hawks and crows to tear. 
The night had witnessed the sin and shrouded it ; she 
and the sunny light of day had tracked and found it. And 
the sickness of its guilt was on her in all its ghastliness, in 
all its secret craven vileness. 

One thought alone seemed left her ; was she too late, 
or could this human life, even in its last hour, be saved, be 
called back even though it had ebbed away ? 

She felt for the beating of his heart; a quick shudder ran 
through all her frame — her hand was wet with the blood 
that had soaked through linen and velvet, and flowed in its 
deep stream from his breast. Yet she did not shrink, but 
pressed it there, seeking for the throbbing of the life ; the 
pulse beat slowly, faintly still, beneath her touch — he lived 
even now. The carrion-birds were poised on the boughs, 
or settled on the rocky ledges, waiting for the prey which 
soon or late must come to them ; the hound was tearing 
up the moss with his muzzle to the earth ; she called him 
to her ; the dog was her friend, her guard, her slave — he 
came, reluctantly, looking backward at the mosses he had 
uprooted in his thirst for the scent they gave ; she drew 
him to her, and signed him to look at the dying man 
where he was stretched across his horse ; then pointed to 
the westward with some words in Silesian. The hound 
looked upward an instant with earnest, eloquent eyes, 


“n’ETES VOUS PAS DU PARADIS V 1 


51 


trying to read her will — then, at his fall speed, obeyed 
her, and went down the ravine ; she had sent from her her 
sole defender, while, for aught she knew, the murderers of 
the man she sought to save might return to the scene of 
their outrage, and deal with her as they had dealt with 
him. But cowardice was scarcely more in her blood than 
in his to whose succor she had come with the light of the 
morning, and whose face was turned upward white and 
rigid, in mute appeal, in voiceless witness, stern, as one 
who has fallen in fierce contest, but calm as though he lay 
in the tranquillity of sleep. She gazed at him thus, till 
hot tears gathered in her eyes, and fell upon his forehead; 
he was a stranger, and not of her land ; she knew not how 
his death had been dealt, nor in what cause he had fallen, 
whence he came, nor what his life had been ; but his face 
touched to the heart all of pity there- was in her, where he 
lay blind and unconscious in the glory of the sun, though 
many had said that pity was a thing unknown to her. 
The falling of her tears upon his brow, or the touch of her 
hand as it swept back the hair from his temples, and 
fanned his temples with a fragrant bough of pine to 
freshen the sultry heat of the noonday, awoke him to 
some returning life ; a heavy sigh heaved his chest, he 
stirred wearily, and his lips moved without sound. She 
knew what he must need — all of comfort or of aid that she 
could give — and folding one of the broad dock leaves cup- 
shape, she filled it at the bed of the torrent, and, raising 
his head, held the cold water to his parched and colorless 
lips. 

Unconsciously, instinctively, he drank and drank, slak- 
ing the intolerable thirst ; she filled it three times at the 
channel of the river, and he drained in new existence from 
that green forest-cup, from that fresh and icy water, held 
to him by his ministering angel. Then his head sank 
back, lying against her, resting on her arm ; his eyes had 
not unclosed, he was senseless still, save that he was 
vaguely conscious of a sense of coolness, languor, rest, 
and peace ; and the vultures on ‘the rocks above looked 
down with ravenous impatience, waiting till the watcher 
should weary of her vigil, aud their prey be their own 
again. 


52 


IDALIA. 


She would not have left him now though she should 
have died with him. She knew the lawless brutality of 
the mountain hordes of gipsies and of plunderers, well 
enough to know that in all likelihood those who had lefc 
him for dead might return to strip him of all that was of 
value on his person, and would slay her, without remorse 
or mercy, lest she should bear testimony to them and to 
their work ; but to desert him and leave him to the lust of 
the carrion-birds and the torrid heat of the noon never 
passed in thought even before her — whatever fate should 
come of it, she had cast in her lot with his. 

The sun fell through the tracery of firs upon the rushing 
water, the mosses red with blood, the black flock of the 
waiting birds, and the motionless form of Erceldoune, 
stretched across his slaughtered horse, his head resting, 
as if in the serenity of sleep, upon the bosom of the 
woman who had saved him, while above bent the magnifi- 
cence of her face, with a golden light on its mournful 
splendor, and the softness of compassion in the luster of 
the eyes that watched him in his unconsciousness. 

Time wore on, the sun rose to noon height, the heat 
grew more intense, and they were still alone ; he lay as in 
a trance still, but with that vague sense of coolness and of 
peace, all that he knew or sought to know ; once his eyes 
unclosed, weary and blind, and saw, as in a vision, the face 
as of an angel above him. He had not strength to rouse, 
power to wonder, consciousness to know or ask whether 
he slept, or dreamed, or beheld but the phantom of his 
own brain ; but his eyes gazed upward at the loveliness 
that looked down on him, with the warmth of morning on 
it, and it pierced through the mists of death and the chaos 
of unconsciousness, and sank into his sight and heart, 
never again to be forgotten. While the sun was at its 
zenith and the day rolled onward, he was conscious, 
through all his anguish, despite all his stupor, of the fra- 
grance of leaves that fanned his brow and stirred the heated 
air with soothing movement, of the gentle murmur of 
river- waters sounding through the stillness, and — ever 
when his eyes unclosed and looked upward on the radi- 
ance of the day — of the face that he saw in the luminance 
of the light, even as the face of a guardian angel. And 


“N’ETES YOUS PAS DU PARADIS?” 


53 


he knew no more in the dullness of lulled pain, in the 
languor of profound exhaustion. 

The loud bay of a hound broke the silence when noon 
long had passed, the rapid rush of the dog’s feet scoured 
over the rocks above and down the winding path ; he had 
known that he had been bidden to seek succor, and had 
left those he first met no peace till they had followed him 
— two Moldavian peasants, herdsmen or stable-helpers, 
who had understood the meaning of the hound’s impatient 
bark and whine. 

At the sound of their steps she moved from the wounded 
man, and rose, with the grace which made her every action 
beautiful as the wild antelope’s, imperial as a sovereign’s 
in her court. 

The Moldavians listened with profound reverence while 
she spoke, and without pause or question hastened to obey 
her command ; deeds of violence were not so rare at the 
foot of the Carpathians, in the heart of the Principalities, 
as to excite either the horror or the wonder of the passive 
serfs ; they went without a word to their work, wrenched 
down the long boughs of the pines, stripped them, lashed 
the bare poles together, and covered them with lesser 
branches of the firs, overstrewn in turn by the yielding 
velvet moss of the forest, till they had formed a rude 
stretcher, rough in form but fragrant and easy ; then they 
laid him on it, lifting him with kindly gentleness. At the 
first movement which raised him, and the sharp agony it 
caused, careful and not untender though it was, he fainted ; 
they might have taken him where they would ; he knew 
nothing. The Moldavians prepared to raise the litter on 
their shoulders, then looked to her: 

“Home, your Excellency?” 

She started, and stood silent ; then over the light and 
beauty of her face swept a shadow, as of bitter memory. 

“ No — no !” she answered them, in their own Moldavian 
tongue. “ Go to the Convent of Monastica ; it is nearer, 
and they will tend him better there. If auy can save him, 
the Sisters will.” 

“And we are to tell them ?” 

“ Tell them where you found this stranger, lying as one 
dead, and powerless to say who are his assassins ; do not 
5 * 


54 


IDALIA* 


give my name, or speak of me ; that be is wounded, and 
alone, and in need, will be enough to gain him care and 
pity at Monastica. When you have left him in safety at 
the convent, come back here ; you shall bury the horse, it 
shall not be food for vultures. Now go — each moment is 
precious. I shall know with what fidelity you serve him, 
aud shall reward you as you do it well.” 

Yet, though she had bidden them go, she stood still, 
looking down on the litter where Erceldoune lay; she had 
saved this man’s life at peril of her own, yet they would 
probably never meet again ; she had redeemed him from 
amid the dead, yet he would have no memory of her, no 
knowledge that she had been with him in the hour of his 
extremity, and rescued him from his grave. Her eyes dwelt 
on him in a silent farewell, and a certain tenderness came 
over all her face as she bowed her head, while her lips 
moved with the words of a Greek prayer and benediction 
over the life of which she knew nothing, yet which in some 
sense had been made her own by every law of gratitude 
for a great deliverance. 

Then she signed to the bearers to raise the litter and go 
onward. They wound slowly with their burden up the 
narrow pass, and she sank down on the fallen trunk leveled 
by his assassins for their barricade, her rich dress sweeping 
the blood-stained mosses, her head resting on her hands 
that were twisted in the lustrous masses of her hair; her 
eyes, with their mournful brilliance, their luminance fathom- 
less as that of tropic skies by night, gazing into the depths 
of the torrent foaming below in its black bed ; and at her 
side the Silesian hound, his mane erect, his head uplifted, 
his feet pawing the turf, as though he scented the blood- 
trail, and panted for command to hunt the evil-doers to 
their lair. 

A small antique chamber, with gray walls and snow- 
white draperies ; an ebony crucifix with a marble Christ 
hanging above an altar draped with velvet, and broidered 
with gold, and fragrant with lilies in silver cups ; a painted 
Gothic window through which were seen stretches of green 
pine-woods and golden haze beyond; and an intense still- 
ness through which pealed, softly and subdued, the chant 


“n’ETES YOUS PAS DU PARADIS?” 55 

of the Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi , — these were 
what Erceidoune opened his eyes upon, and saw, and 
heard, when he awoke from a long trance that had been 
death itself for aught he knew, and through which he had 
only been conscious of burning torture, of intolerable pain, 
of mellow strains of music floating through his brain, and 
of one face of divinest beauty bent above him while he lay 
bound in bonds of iron, in swathes of fire. For he had 
been delirious for many days in the Convent of Monastica. 

His life had hung on a thread ; the ball was in his 
breast, and the fever of his wounds, combined with the 
weakness consequent on loss of blood, had kept him in 
sharpest peril through all the -rest of that sultry autumn. 
But the bullet had missed his lungs, and the intense vi- 
tality and resistance in him brought him through all which 
would have slain at a blow a weaklier and less hardily 
trained frame. The skill in leechcraft of the Sisters of 
Monastica was proverbial in the Principalities ; women 
who loved him could not have tended him more tenderly 
and unweariedly than did those high-born recluses who 
had sought the solitudes of the dense Moldavian pine- 
forests, in a conventual community different to those of any 
other country. He was saved, and awoke one sunlit even- 
ing, conscious and calm, gazing dreamily and wonderingly 
at the dead Christ on the altar, and the narrow arched 
window, with its glimpse of plain and forest through the 
slit, while the Agnus Dei pealed on the stillness of the 
chamber. He thought himself dreaming still. 

To his bedside came a nun, pale, gentle, with dovelike 
eyes, a woman no longer young. Erceidoune looked at 
her dimly ; the past was a blank, yet unfamiliar as the 
chamber was to him, and unreal his own personality, he 
vaguely desired and missed what he had seen throughout 
his delirium — what he did not behold on awakening. And 
the first words he spoke were : 

“ Where is sheV 1 

The Sister shook her head, looking on him with a com- 
passionate welcoming smile : 

“ I cannot understand, ray son. I can speak a little 
French, but you must not talk yet, you are too weak.” 

All European languages, most of the Eastern, had been 


56 


TDALTA. 


as familiar to him as his own. He repeated his question 
impatiently in the nun’s tongue : 

“ Where is she ?” 

“ Who, my son ?” 

“ Who ? A woman — or an angel — who has been with 
me always.” 

“ Noue have been with you, my son, save myself and 
those of my order.” 

He made a faint intolerant sign of dissent ; and his 
eyes wandered over the place where he lay, in weary 
search, missing in consciousness and in reality the face 
which had been ever before him in delirium. 

“ Where am I, then ?” 

“ In our convent at Monastica. You were found all 
but lifeless in the forest by two peasants, who brought you 
hither. You have been in sore peril, my son, but, by the 
blessing of the most holy Mother of God, we have wrought 
your cure. But keep silence, and rest now ; you are very 
weak.” 

“ Weak ?_ IV' 

He repeated the word in marveling incredulity; he 
who had stood face to face with the lion in the sultry 
African night, and measured his strength with the desert 
king’s, and prevailed, — he who from his childish years up- 
ward, through a long, and daring, and adventurous life, 
had never known his force to fail, his power to desert 
him, — was unable to realize that he could be laid low and 
powerless as any reed leveled by the wind 1 Instinctively 
he lifted his right arm to raise himself — that right arm 
which had never failed him yet in battle, in storm, in the 
death-grapple, or in any blow dealt in love of justice, in 
hatred of dishonor — it fell nerveless and broken. Then 
he realized that his strength was gone ; and for the sole 
time in his life, Erceldoune could have turned his face to 
the wall and wept like a woman. 

“ I remember,” he said, faintly. “ I remember now. 
The cowards shot me down, and she saved me. Tell them 
I destroyed ‘the papers;’ but ” 

The words died away unintelligible to the nun, his head 
fell back, and his eyes closed ; he felt how utter was his 
weakness. He lay exhausted, his thoughts wandering 


“N’ETES VOUS PAS DU PARADIS?” 


57 


over all that past of peril which had long been a blank to 
him, and which now slowly and by degrees returned to 
memory, striving to realize what manner of thing this could 
be, this calamity of stricken strength wdiick his life had 
never before dreaded or conceived. Sweeping like Are 
through his blood, and filling his frame as with fresh life, 
there came with consciousness recollection of the murder- 
ous gang who had stretched him there, and fierce natural 
thirst for vengeance on his cowardly foes, for the hour of 
reckoning when he should rise and deal with that craven 
womanish brute, whose gentle mellow laugh had bidden 
them “ kill the Border Eagle,” and whose shot had brought 
him to the earth. 

A fair and open antagonist Erceldoune would honor, 
and forgive frankly and generously from his heart ; but to 
the coward treachery that struck him in the dark, he swore 
that death itself should not be more pitiless or more inex- 
orable than his wrath. 

The shadows lengthened through the painted window, 
the music ceased from the convent chapel, the nun left 
him, and knelt before the altar lost in prayer; it was in- 
tensely still, no sound was upon the air save that from the 
distance the bells of one of the Moldavian monasteries 
were chiming the vespers — it was a pause as strange in 
his strong, rapid, varied, richly-colored life of action and 
adventure as that which we feel when we enter the shaded 
silent aisles of some cathedral, and the doors close behind 
us, shutting out all the accustomed crowds, the busy whirl, 
and the swift press, and the hot sunlight of the city we 
have left without. lie had never known in ail the years 
of his existence that profound exhaustion, that death-like 
prostration, in which all vitality seems suspended, and in 
which a lulled, dreamy, listless meditation is all of which 
we are left capable ; he knew them now as he lay gaziug 
at the altar, with its dead Christ and its white river-lilies, 
and the bowed form of the kneeling nun, while all sense of 
pain, of weakness, of thirst for the just vengeance he would 
rise and reach, drifted from him, merged and lost in one 
memory. A memory luminous, angel-like, as are the im- 
aginations which fill the mind of painters with shapes di- 
vine and visions of beauty, but such as had never entered 


68 


ID ALIA. 


the life or the thoughts of this man till now, when, in the 
sunset stillness of the lonely oratory at Monastica he saw 
ever oefore him, with the depths of an unspeakable com- 
passion in her fathomless eyes, the face of the woman who 
had saved him. 

Where was she? 

He questioned ceaselessly for many days each of the 
order who came to his bedside and tended him with skilled 
care, and brought him fruits and sherbet, and prayed for 
him at the altar, where the lilies were placed fresh with 
every dawn, and the dead God looked clown with serene 
and mournful smile. lie insisted that a woman had come 
to him in the defile when he lay there flying, and had given 
him water, and had saved him. They thought his per- 
sistence the remembrance of some delirious hallucination, 
some dream which haunted him, and which he could not 
sever from reality. He saw the Moldavian serfs, who 
came each day during his danger to the convent for news 
of him ; and, while he rewarded them, interrogated them 
as to how and where they had discovered him. They 
answered that a dog had led them to where he lay, and 
that they had seen that he was all but lifeless, and had 
made a litter of pine-boughs and brought him to the gates 
of Monastica for succor. When he pressed them, and in- 
sisted that a woman had been the first to rescue him, the 
Moldavians shook their heads ; they had found him, and 
had brought him hither. They had barely more intel- 
ligence than that of a kindly good-humored animal, and 
adhered doggedly to their statement ; it was useless to 
question them ; Erceldoune bade them be given half the 
gold pieces in his traveling-belt, and let them go. It was 
Dot his nature to pursue uselessly, nor to give expression 
to a futile annoyance or an unavailing disappointment ; 
he was silent from that moment on the subject. 

The nuns, with their Mother Superior, thought he had 
become convinced that his fancy was the phantom of his 
delirium. Erceldoune remained certain that no unreality, 
no mere vision, fever begotten, would have been impressed 
as this w r as upon him ; he remembered what it would have 
been wholly unlike him to have imagined. And this fugi- 
tive memory of one who had been his savior iu his ex- 


"N’ETES VOUS PAS DU PARADIS?” 59 

tremity, yet who was lost to him on his awakening to con- 
sciousness, filled his thoughts unceasingly during the lull 
of his life in the solitudes of Mouastica. 

For many weeks he lay there in the antique quiet cham- 
ber, with the glimpse of hill and torrent seen through its 
single casement, and the cadence of the Angelus or the 
Pro Peccatis alone breaking the stillness at matins, mass, 
or vespers ; the inaction, the imprisonment, the monotony, 
were as intolerable to him as to a fettered lion, for though 
solitude might be oftentimes his preference, it was ever the 
solitude of freedom, of action, and of the grandeur of 
desert wilds He recovered slowly but surely, the science 
of the Sisters and his own natural strength bringing him 
through in the teeth of imminent peril ; but it was far into 
the autumn, and the pines were the only trees not bare in 
the Moldavian woods, when he rose with anything of his 
old power in his limbs, with anything of the old muscular 
force in his right arm, and breathed without pain, and 
was free to go back to the world of the living without 
danger. 

Meanwhile, Europe rang for a space with his attempted 
assassination. A Queen’s Messenger could not have been 
left for murdered, and English State papers of the first and 
most secret importance been waylaid by so singular and 
trained a conspiracy, without the outrage being of import, 
and rousing alike the wrath of his government and the 
speculations of all other powers. That those who had 
stopped him were no ordinary assassins and marauders the 
object of their plunder showed; common banditti would 
have menaced his money, not his dispatches, it seemed 
evident that his enemies had been men of considerable re- 
sources and power, that they had been well acquainted 
with his movements, and that their object had been polit- 
ical. Southern Europe was in the throes of revolt, and 
much of central and eastern Europe seething in intrigue; 
political gamesters would have counted one man’s assassi- 
nation a very little cost for the gain of political information 
and advantage in their unscrupulous rouge et noir. 

Amid all, the criminals remained untracked. Moldavia* 
said sne did all she could to discover and render them up 
to justice. Whether or not this were true, they were un- 


60 


IDALIA. 


discovered : the little State was heavily mulcted for the 
outrage, and the perpetrators went scot free at large, the 
night and their masks having shrouded them, the pine- 
forests telling no tales, and the sole clew to their subse- 
quent identification lying in Erceldoune’s recognition by 
voice of their ringleader, as the vivacious and graceful be- 
wailer for the sacrifice of crystallized violets whom he had 
met at the Paris cafe. 

The menace of England failed to track his assassins and 
bring them to their reckoning ; but he swore that sooner or 
later his own vengeance should find them, and strike home 
to that tiger brute whose laugh he would know again 
though a score of years should have rolled away before 
they stood face to face. 

“ You bear no malice to your savage murderers, my 
son?” said the Abbess of Monastica to him, wistfully, one 
day, an aged woman, white-haired and venerable, gentle 
as a child, and unworldly as an infant, for she had taken 
the veil in her fourteenth year, and had never left the con- 
vent now that she had reached her seventieth, save on an 
occasional visit, as permitted by Moldavian rules, to the 
innocent festivities of Jassy. 

Malice, madam ? No ! I am not a woman I” 

The Abbess looked at him wistfully still ; the answer 
was affirmative, yet she was not wholly secure that this 
was the meek and lowly mercy which she sought to win 
from him. 

“ Then you forgive them, my son, and would remember, 
if you met them, the Lamb of God’s injunction, ‘If thy 
enemy smite thee on one cheek, give him the other,’ and 
would refrain from all vengeance — would you not?” 

Erceldoune’s hand came down on the massive oak table 
standing by him with a force that shook it to its center. 

“ By my honor, madam, I would remember it so, that 
the life should not be left in one of them ! Forgive? Ay 1 
when I have turned dastard like them.” 

The Mother Superior gazed at him with perplexed 
trouble in her eyes; the childlike innocent woman could 
not understand the strong unfettered nature of the man, 
with its deep -passions and its fiery honor, which made the 
low serpent meanness of malice as impossible and incom- 


“N’ETE8 VOUS PAS DU PARADIS ?” 


61 


prehensible to him as it made the chastisement of cowardice 
and the vengeance of treachery instinctive and imperative, 
resistless as an impulse as it was sacred as a duty. 

“But forgiveness is godlike, my son.” 

“ May be, madam ; but I am mortal.” 

“ But it is a human duty.” 

“To an open, gallant foe, madam — yes! I will render 
it him to-morrow, and honor him from my soul the better 
he fights me and the harder he strikes ; but the serpent 
that stings me in the dark I set my heel on, for the vermin 
he is, and serve God and man when I strangle him!” 

The venerable Abbess sighed ; she had ministered to 
him through liis unconsciousness and through his suffering, 
she had seen him bear torture with a silent endurance that 
seemed to her superhuman in its heroism, and she had 
wept over the stately stature, leveled like a cedar felled 
by the axe, and the superb strength brought down to 
worse than a child’s weakness, till she had felt for him 
something of a mother’s tenderness, and found it hard to 
urge him to love and to pardon his injurers. Moreover, 
Mother Veronica was no casuist. 

“It must be bitter, my son, I know,” she murmured, 
“ and the evil spirit is strong in us, and fearful to subdue ; 
but one who suffered a deadlier wrong than thine forgave 
the traitor and the murderer, though Judas sold him to 
the Cross.” 

Erceldoune gave a movement of impatience, and the 
muscles of his arm straightened as though by sheer in- 
stinct of longing to “deliver from the shoulder.” 

“Pardon me, holy mother, I am no theologian! But I 
know this, that if there had been a touch of loyalty and 
fealty among the eleven left, that scoundrel of Iscariot 
would not have lived till the morrow to hang himself. If 
I had been in Galilee, he would have had a lunge of steel 
through his lungs, and died a traitor’s death !” 

So startling a view of apostolic duty had never pene- 
trated the sacred walls of the Convent of Monastica ; the 
whole range of her instruction from the Church had never 
given her a rule by which to deal with such a novel article 
of creed, and she sat silent, gazing at him with a wistful 
bewilderment, wondering what the sainted Ilemigius had 

6 


62 


IDALIA. 


replied when King Clovis gave him a similar answer in 
the old days of Gaul. 

Ercnldoune, who felt a sincere gratitude to the aged 
woman who had showed him a mother’s tenderness and 
care throughout a lengthened peril, bent to her with gentle 
reverence, which sat well upon him. 

“ Pardon me, madam, I spoke something roughly, and 
men should not talk of these matters to women. There is 
one broad ground on which we can meet and understand 
one another, that of your goodness to a stranger, and his 
sincere recognition of it. Let that suffice I” 

And Moiher Veronica smiled wistfully on him, and 
after seventy years of unsullied devotion to the Supreme 
Church, found herself guilty of the horrible heresy of loving 
one whose soul was lost, and whose wild living will, and 
erring, wayward creeds, were the most fatal forms of tu- 
mult and revolt against which the Infallible Faith warned 
her I 

An eagle from his native Cheviot-side, fettered in a 
cage, would not have been less fitted for it than Ercel- 
dounc for his imprisonment at Monastica ; as soon as he 
was strong enough to be raised in his couch, and was able 
to use his arm, he beguiled the time with a pastime which 
had often whiled away hours and days of enforced inaction, 
in quarantine, on board ship, becalmed in the tropics, or 
cooped up in Marseilles during the mistral. He painted 
extremely well. He was too thorough a man of action, 
too truly the English Effendi of the Eastern nations, ever 
to take art or indolence by choice ; but there had come 
many times in his life when to paint the rare scenery, or 
the picturesque groupings around him, had been his only 
available pursuit; and he did this with singular dash and 
delicacy, vividness and truth. Erceldoune would never 
have been a creative artist; he had not the imaginative or 
poetic faculty which idealizes, it was wholly alien to his na- 
ture and his habits ; but what he saw he rendered with a force, 
a fidelity, and a brilliance of hue which painters by the score 
had envied him. He passed the dreary weeks now at 
Monastica painting what he had seen ; and the picture 
grew into such life and loveliness that the nuns marveled 
when they looked on it, as the Heligieuses of Bruges mar- 


“N’ETES YOUS PAS DU PARADIS?” 63 

veled when they saw the “Marriage of St. Katherine” 
left in legacy to them by the soldier-artist Hans Heading 
whose wounds they had dressed, and cried out that it 
should be the Virginal altar-piece in a world-famed ca 
thedral. Yet the picture was but a woman’s face — a face 
with thoughtful lustrous eyes, and hair with a golden reflex 
on it, aqd lips which wore a smile that had something 
more profound than sadness, and more imperial than ten- 
derness ; a face looking downward from an aureole of light, 
half sunlit and half shadowed. 

“Now I know that I have seen it, or I could not have 
painted, it,” said Erceldoune to himself, as he cast down 
his brushes ; and to know that, was why he had done so. 

“Keep the picture, madam, as altar-piece, or what it 
please you, in token of my gratitude at the least for the 
kindness I cannot hope to return,” he said to the Mother 
Superior ; “ and, if you ever see a womfcn whose likeness 
you recognize in it, she will be the one to whom I first 
owed the rescue of my life. Tell her Fulke Erceldoune 
waits to pay his debt.” 

And Mother Veronica heard him with as much pain in 
his last words as she had had pleasure in his first, for she 
saw that the phantom of his delirium was still strong on 
him, and feared that his mind must wander, to be so 
haunted by this mere hallucination of the lady of his 
dreams. 

A few days later bn, Erceldoune, able at last to endure 
the return journey through the mountains and across Hun- 
gary, attended a Te Deurn to gratify the Abbess, in cele- 
bration and thanksgiving for his own restoration from death 
to life ; left his three months’ pay to the almsgiving of the 
order; bowed his lofty head for the tearful benediction of 
the Mother Superior ; and quitted the innocent community 
of religious women, in whose convent he had found asy- 
lum ; the Angelus chiming him a soft and solemn farewell, 
as, in the late leafless autumn, while the black Danube was 
swelling with the first rains of winter, and the forests were 
strewn with the yellow leaves that covered the grave of 
his dead sorrel, he went out from the solitudes of Monas- 
tica back to the living world. 


64 


IDALTA 


CHAPTER y. 

k an ignis fatuus gleam of love.” 

“ It was a superb thing — magnificent!” 

The most popular personage in the English Cabinet 
was standing on the hearth-rug of his own library of his 
wife’s chateau of Liramar, South Italy, where he had 
snatched a brief autumn holiday, nothing altered and little 
aged since some twenty years before when the beggared 
Border-lord, in the pride and liberty of his youth and his 
ruin, had won the great Minister’s liking for life, by — a 
defiance. 

Erceldoune laughed, a little impatiently. 

“Nothing of the kind! Any other man in the service 
would have done the same ; simplest duty possible.” 

“ Simple duties get done in this world, do they ? Humph ! 
I didn’t know it. I suppose you expected, when you gave 
the word to fire, that the brutes would kill you — eh ?” 

“ Of course ! I can’t think now how they missed it. I 
ought to have been riddled with bullets, if they had aimed 
properly.” 

“ 1 believe he’s half disgusted he wasn’t wholly dead, 
now!” said his lordship, plaintively. “It was a superb 
thing, I tell you ; but don’t you do it again, Erceldoune. 
The trash we write, to bully and blind one another, isn’t 
worth the loss of a gallant man’s life. We know that ! A 
terrible fellow went and said so too, in the Commons, last 
session ; he was up, and nobody could stop him. He told 
us, point blank to our faces, that though we posed very 
successfully for the innocent public, we might as well drop 
the toga and show the sock and buskin before each other, 
as the attitudinizing didn’t take in the initiated, and must 
be a fearful bore always for us! Clever fellow. Tre- 
mendous hard hitter ; but he wants training. By-the-way, 
the Principalities paid us down a heavy fine as indemnity 
for that outrage; half the money comes to you, clearly.” 


“AN IGNIS FATUUS GLEAM OF LOVE.” 65 

“I thank you, my dear lord, I have no need of it.” 

“Eh? What? I thought you were poor, Ercel- 
doune ?” 

“ I am ; but I have never been in debt, and I want no- 
thing. Besides, if you will pardon my saying so, I don’t 
admire that system of ‘indemnification,’” pursued Ercel- 
doune, giving himself a shake like a staghound where 
he leaned against the marble mantle-piece. “A single 
scoundrel, or a gang of scoundrels, commits an insult, as in 
this case, on England, or any other great power, through 
the person of her representative, or perhaps merely 
through the person of one of her nation ; the State to 
which the rascals belong is heavily mulcted, by way of 
penalty. Who suffers? Not the guilty, but the unhappy 
multitudes, peasants, traders, farmers, citizens, gentlemen 
— all innocent — who pay the taxes and the imposts ! With 
an outrage from a great power, if accidentally committed 
on a traveler »y a horde of thieves, you would take no 
notice whatever ; if one svere obviously done as a political 
insult, you would declare war. But when the thing hap- 
pens in a small Sta e, she is punished by an enormous fine, 
which half ruins her, for a crime which she could no more 
prevent than you can help in Downing Street the last 
wreckers’ murder that took place in Cornwall. Pardon 
me, but I fail to see the justice or the dignity of the sys- 
tem ; and for myself, when my own conviction is that the 
assassins who stopped me were not Moldavians at all, 
what compensation would it be to mo to have the money 
wrung from a million or two guiltless people, whose coun- 
try the cowards chose to select as their field ? If you 
wish to avenge me, track the dastards, and give them into 
my power.” 

The statesman listened as they stood alone in the library, 
and looked at his guest, with humor lighting up his blue 
eyes. 

“Erceldoune, if you hadn’t that stiff-necked Scottish 
pride, which would make you knock me down, in all proba- 
bility, if I offered it, I would give you three thousand a 
year to live with me and speak your mind,” laughed his 
lordship, meaning his words too. “ You are a miracle in 
your generation ; you’re not a bit like this age, sir ; not a 
E 6* 


G6 


IDALIA. 


whit more than the Napiers; you speak rarely, and never 
speak but the truth ; you have to choose between your life 
and your trust, and, as a matter of course, give up your 
life ; you are moneyless, and refuse money the State would 
tender you, because you think it gained ‘neither by justice 
nor dignity ;’ you have dined at my house in town, you 
have stayed in my house in the country; you know that I 
like you, and yet you are the only man of my acquaintance 
who has never asked me for anything 1 On my life, sir, 
you don’t do for this century.” 

“Unfit for my century, my lord, because I value your 
friendship, and honor your esteem too highly to regard 
both only as ladders to * place !’” 

The Minister stretched his hand out to him with one of 
those warm silent gestures of acknowledgment, very un- 
common with him. but very eloquent. Too sweet and 
sunny a temper to be a “good hater,” he was a cordial 
friend : bow true and steadfast a friend those only knew 
who knew him ia private life. 

“Well, the State at least owes you something,” he said, 
after a pause. “ You must let us pay our debt. Messen- 
gerships never do lead to anything, but that is no reason 
why they should not in your person. There are many 
half civil half military appointments for which your life 
has fitted you, and which you yourself would fill better than 
any man I know ; the governorship of some good island, 
for instance.” 

Erceldoune was silent a moment, leaning against the 
marble. 

“ I thank you sincerely, but I want nothing, and I have 
too much of the nomad in me to care to relinquish my 
wandering life in saddle. Give me no credit for asceti- 
cism, or renunciation ; it is nothing of the kind. I should 
have been born a desert chief; I have never been happier 
than in the Kabyles- ‘ houses of hair,’ living on maize and 
camel- flesh, and waiting for the lions through the night 
with the Zouaves and the Arabs. If you think, however, 
that I have really done enough to have earned any pref- 
erence from England, I will ask you to send me on service, 
as soon as 1 am myself again, to South and East Europe, 
with your authorization to take leisure in returning tf I 


67 


“an ignis fatuus gleam of love.” 

desire it, and full powers from the government to go to 
any expenses, or impress any assistance I require, if I 
should be able to discover the persons, or the track of the 
assassins.” 

‘‘Certainly, you shall have both to the fullest extent. 
You shall have the authorization of the Crown to act pre- 
cisely as you see fit; and spare no cost, if you can get on 
the villains’ trail, in bringing them to justice. I fear you 
will be baffled: we don’t know enough to identify them ; they 
seconded us well in France, and everything was tried, but 
failed. It was in Paris you had seen the man whose voice 
you recognized, wasn’t it ? Would you know him again ?” 

Erceldoune ground his heel into the tiger skin of the 
hearth-rug as though his tiger foe were under his feet : he 
longed to have his hand on the throat of the silky murder- 
ous brute. 

“ 1 would swear to h!s voice and his laugh anywhere a 
score of years hence; and I should know him again, too: 
he was as beautiful as a woman, though J did not take his 
measure as I should have done had I guessed where we 
should meet.” 

“ The object, of course, was purely political, and there 
are thousands of men — Carlists, Citramontanists, Carbo- 
narists, Reactionists, Socialists, and all the rest of the 
Continentalists — who would have held that they only 
obeyed their chiefs, and acted like patriots in shooting you 
down, for the sake of your papers. Well, you shall have 
your own way, Erceldoune, and all you ask — it is little 
enough ! Lady George !” broke off his lordship, viva- 
ciously, as a party from the billiard-room entered the 
library, ‘here is Erceldoune so enamored of the country 
he was murdered in, that he is asking me to have him sent 
off there again ! These Messenger fellows are never 
quiet : he says he ought to be an Arab chief, and so he 
should be.” 

“ He only wants the white haick to look like one,” 
smiled Lady George, a lovely blonde, dropping her azure 
eyes on him with an effective side glance — wholly wasted. 

Erceldoune, to his own infinite annoyance, had found 
himself an object of hero worship to all the brilliant beau- 
ties down at Liramar, where he had been bidden by the 


68 


ID ALIA 


great Minister as soon as he was able to leave Monastica, 
and where that unworn octogenarian was himself taking a 
rare short rest in the November of the year. Ilis lord- 
ship was imperative in his summons to his favorite cou- 
rier, to whom the southern air was likely to give back the 
lost strength which was still only returning slowly and 
wearily to muscles and limbs whose force had been “ even 
as the lions of Libya.” 

The story of his single-handed peril, his choice of death 
rather than disloyalty to his trust, in the silent ravine of 
the Moldavian pine woods, had sent a thrill of its own 
chivalry through the languid, nil admirari , egotistic, list- 
less pulses of high-bred society. Erceldoune was the hero 
of the hour if he chose; and the Border Eagle might 
have folded his strong pinions under the soft caress of a 
thousand white hands. But he did not choose: he had 
never cared for women — they had never gained any hold 
on him. Steeped in vice in his earliest years, sensuality 
had little power over his manhood ; and the languid in- 
trigues, the hollow homage, the “love” of the drawing- 
rooms — pulseless, insipid, artificial, frivolous, pare & la 
mode — were still more contemptible, and absolutely im- 
possible to him. Nor was fashionable life to his taste : its 
wheels within wheels ill suited the singleness of his own 
character; the feverish puerility of its envies and ambi 
tions woke no chord of sympathy in him; and its hot 
pressed atmosphere was too narrow, and too rarefied with 
heat and perfume, for the lungs which only breathed freely 
on the moorland and the prairie, on the ocean and the 
mountain side. A man once bound to the great world is 
a slave till the day of his death, and Erceldoune could not 
have lived in chains. 

“ You are very like one of the eagles of your own Bor- 
der, Sir Fulke,” said a French Duchesse at Liramar to 
him. She had been a beauty, and now, at forty, was a 
power — the customary development of a Frenchwoman. 

“ In love of liberty, madam, and solitude? Well, yes.” 

He thought how he and the golden eagle had fallen, 
much alike, and the thought crossed him vaguely, should 
he ever live to wish that the shot, like the eagle’s, had told 
home ? 


“an ignis fatuus gleam of love.” 69 

“Yes, and if I were twenty years younger, I would 
tame you !” said the Duchesse, with a malicious smile. 
“Ah I how you would suffer, how you would beat your 
Btrong wiugs against the chains, how you would hate and 
worship, in one breath, your captor, and how you would 
pant out your great life in torture till you sank down at 
last in slavery as intense as your resistance I” 

li I! You do not know me much, Miladi.” 

The Duchesse gave him a perfumy touch with her fan as 
she swept away. 

“ Bah 1 M. Erceldoune, I know your tribe and I know 
their tamers. You will find a worse foe than a bullet, 
soon or late. Your assassins were merciful to what your 
love will be — when you love. See if I am wrong !” 

And with a laugh of compassion and of mocking pre- 
science the prophetess of dark omen went to her whist- 
table, where she played as well as Prince Metternich ; and 
Erceldoune passed on his way to the smoking-room, a 
contemptuous disdain working in him; — “love!” he had 
never known it, he had never believed in it, the frank bold- 
ness of his nature had been proof against most of its se- 
ductions, and he only recognized in it a sophistical syno- 
nym for women’s vanity and men’s sensuality, or vice 
versa ; and, take it in the long run, he was undoubtedly 
right. 

His passions were great; but they had never been fairly 
aroused ; and he had, or thought he had, them under an 
iron bridle, like some Knight of St. John, half priest, half 
Boldier, stern warrior and ascetic monk in one, his soul, 
like his body, mailed in steel, and wrestling with the vile 
tempters of the flesh, as with twining serpents that sought 
to wreathe round and stille out his martial strength, and 
drag it downward into voluptuous fumes, and enervating 
shame, and weakness, that would disgrace his manhood 
and his pride, his order and his oath. 

Yet vague, dreamy, half soft, half stormy thoughts 
swept over him of some love that this world might hold, 
with all the delight of passion, while loftier, richer, holier, 
than mere passion alone, which wakes and desires, pur- 
sues, possesses, — and dies. He believed it a fable ; he was 
incredulous of its dominion; it was, he fancied, alien to 


70 


IDALIA. 


his nature; he neither needed nor accredited it; yet the 
dim glory of some such light that “ never yet was upon 
sea or land,” half touched his life in fancy for a second. 
For, where he sat in the lonely smoking-room, with the 
smoke curling up from the meerschaum bowl which had 
turned the bullet from his heart in Moldavia, and floating 
away to the far recesses of Rembrandtesque shade, out 
from the shadow there seemed to rise, with the luster in 
the eyes and the unspoken tenderness upon the lips, the 
face of the one who had saved him. 

The face of a temptress or an angel ? 

Erceldoune did not ask, as he sat and dreamt of that 
memory called up from the depths of thought and shade ; 
then he rose with an impatient disdain of himself, and 
strode out into the white, warm, Mediterranean night. 

Had he refused to surrender his life to any living wo- 
man, only to have it haunted by a mere phantom-shape, 
an hallucination wrought from the fever fancies of a past 
delirium ? 

The great Minister went home; the gathering at Lira- 
mar remained with the hostess — Erceldoune with them ; 
the sea breezes were bringing him back their old force 
into his limbs, and the mellow air was driving away the 
danger which for a time had threatened his lungs from the 
deep chest wound where the ball had lodged, in physics 
he did not believe — he never touched them ; air and sea 
water were his sole physicians, and under them the fallen 
Titan rose again. 

“I took too much killing !” he laughed to one of the 
men as they drifted down the waters lapping the sunny 
Sicilian shores, in the brief space which severs the day 
from the night. He had reported himself ready for fresh 
service, and the messenger who was to bring the Italian 
bag to Palermo would deliver him dispatches for the Prin- 
cipalities and Asiatic Turkey. Erceldoune was impatient 
to be on the move, and feel himself in saddle once more ; 
while in inaction, too, he was no nearer on his quest — of 
those who had attacked his life, and of the one who had 
saved it. Phantom, hallucination, delirious memory, be it 
what it would, the remembrance which haunted him, and 
which he had no single proof was anything more tangible 


“AN IGNIS FATUUS GLEAM OF LOfE.” 


71 


than a fever-born fancy, was strong on him — the stronger 
the more he thrust it away. The woman who had rescued 
him, and who had since been lost to him in the darkness 
of mystery and the wide wilderness of the world, he could 
not recall, save by such intangible unsubstantiated recol- 
lection as had remained to him from unconsciousness ; 
common reason told him that it could be but a folly which 
haunted the brain from the visions of his long peril, but 
reason failed to drive it out, or shake the first impression 
which had ever wakened or seized his imagination. The 
idea which pursued him, the face he had painted in the 
monastic solitude of the convent, had become to him a 
living reality; he resisted it, he trampled it out; not un- 
frequently he recoiled and shuddered from it, as from the 
phantasia of impending insanity; but it remained there. 
Her face rose before him from the sea depths, when he 
plunged down into the dark violet waves, and let them 
close above his head ; he saw it with every gorgeous sun- 
set that flushed the skies with fire ; he remembered it with 
every hour he spent alone lying on the sands, or steering 
through the waters, or waiting with his rifle for the sea 
birds on the pine-crowned rocks. He could not banish it f * 
and he used no sophism or half truths with himself; he 
knew that, vision or reality, whichever it was, it had do- 
minion over him, and that the search he so thirsted to 
make for his assassins was not more closely woven with his 
thoughts than the quest of what was but “ un ombre, un 
reve, un ricn ” — a phantom and a shadow. 

The boat dropped down the Mediterranean that night, 
while the sun was setting, drifting gently through the blue 
stretch of the waves, while the striped sails were filled by 
a west wind that brought over the sea a thousand odors 
from the far Levant, and the voices of the women idly 
chanted the “Ave Maria, Stella Yirgine 1” Erceldoune 
was stretched in the bottom of the boat, at the feet of a 
fair aristocrat, who leaned her hand over the leeward side 
playing with the water, and letting the drops fall, dia- 
mond bright as her rings, glancing at him now and then 
the while, and wondering, as she had wondered long at 
Liramar, what manner of man this was, who confessed 
himself poor and a mere courier, yet bore himself like a 


IDALTA. 


72 

noble; who had the blood of an ancient race, and the 
habits of a desert chief; who was indifferent and insensi- 
ble to all women, yet had, for all, a grave and gentle cour- 
tesy, for the grape girl among the vineyards yonder, as for 
her, the patrician and the queen of coquettes, leaning here. 
He was unlike anything in her world — and Lady George 
would fain have roused in him the forbidden love which 
she, proud empress though she was, had learned, in her 
own despite, as her own chastisement. 

But Erceldoune lay looking eastward at a lateen boat 
cutting its swift track through the waters ; so little had 
her beauty ever caught his eyes, that he never even knew 
that he had roused her interest. Vanity he had absolutely 
none ; and as for pride in such uncared-for, unsought vic- 
tories, he would have as soon thought of being proud that 
a bright Sicilian butterfly had flown beneath his foot and 
been crushed by it. 

“ How beautifully she cuts her way !” he said to the 
man beside him. “ Look how she dips, and lifts herself 
again — light as a bird 1 She will be past us like light- 
ning.” 

Lady George glanced at her rival across the sea; how 
strange it was, she thought, that any man should live who 
could look at a lateen boat rather than at her ! 

“ As with a hound 
Into the rosy and golden half 
Of the sky, 

I suppose,” she quoted listlessly. 

Their own vessel floated lazily and slowly; the lateen 
craft came on after them, as he had said, turned into a 
pleasure boat, and draped with costliness, and laden with 
a fragrant load of violets gathered for distilling, piled 
high, and filling the air with odor. The skiff passed them 
swiftly; — half screened by the rich draperies, the tawny 
sails, and the purple mound of the violets, and turned half 
from them, and toward the western skies, as the boat 
flashed past, in the haze of light, he saw a woman. 

With a loud cry he sprang to his feet, the vessel rock- 
ing and lurching under the sudden impulse ; — he had seen 
the face of his dreams, the face of his savior. And *he 


“an ignis fatuus gleam of love.” 73 

lateen boat was cutting its swift way through the waves, 
away into the misty purple shadow out of reach, out of 
sight ! 

“Neuralgia?” said one of the men. “Ah ! that is al- 
ways the worst of shot wounds.” 

“ You are ill ? — you are in pain ?” asked Lady George; 
and her voice was hurried and tremulous. 

Erceldounc set his teeth hard, his eyes straining into 
the warm haze where the lateen boat was winging her 
rapid way, out of reach, while their own lay idly rocking 
on the waves. 

“ Pardon me — no,” he said, in answer to them, for the 
man’s nature was too integrally true to seek shelter under 
even a tacit acceptance of an untruth. “ I saw one whom 
I recognized as having last seen in Moldavia the day the 
brigands shot me down. I fear that I foolishly startled 
you all ?” 

They thought it nothing strange that any link with the 
memory of his attempted assassination should have roused 
him ; and he leaned over the boat’s side following the now 
distant track of the light lateen skiff with his eyes, — silent 
in the wild reasonless joy, and the bitter baffled regret, 
which swept together through his veins. The face t at he 
had dreamed had bent over him in his anguish and ex- 
tremity, was then a truth, a living loveliness, a life to bo 
found on earth — no fever-born ideal of his own disordered 
brain ; he had seen again, and seen now in the clearness 
of reason, the face of the woman who had been his minis- 
tering angel. Yet, as she had been lost to him then, so 
she w r as lost to him now; and as the sun sunk down below 
the waves, and the sudden southern night fell shrouding 
the Sicilian boat in its shadows, the phosphor light left in 
its track and the odor of its violet freight dying off from 
the sea and the air, he could have believed he had but 
been dreaming afresh. 

Was he mad ? Erceldounc almost asked himself the 
question as he leaned over the vessel’s side looking down 
into the purple shadows of the water. High born, by the 
beauty of her face, and by the luxury with which that lit- 
tle skiff was decked, how should she have been in the wild 
solitudes of the Moldavian forest ? Compassionate to his 

7 


74 


IDALIA. 


peril and extremity, would she have cared nothing to 
know whether death or life had been at last his portion ? 
— and could an act of such noble and pitying humanity 
have needed the veil of mystery and denial in which it had 
been shrouded by the serfs’ repudiation of all knowledge 
that any save themselves had found him ? 

Yet, the face of which he had dreamed, he had seen 
now in the evening light of the Mediterranean — the mere 
phantom of a delirium could not have become vivid and 
living thus. A heavy oath was stifled in his teeth, as he 
stood with his eyes strained to pierce the cloudy offing. 
Why had he not been alone, that — a few yards more sail 
flung out to the winds, and his own hand upon the helm — . 
his boat could have given chase down the luminous sea, 
and have swept away with hers, no matter at what cost 
of sand-reef or of shipwreck, into that golden mist, that 
twilight darkness 1 


CHAPTER VI. 

THE WISDOM OP MOTHER VERONICA. 

The pines were tipped with their lightest green, the 
torrents were swollen with the winter rains, the rafts were 
rushing, lightning like, down the rivers in the impetus 
that the spring lends to nature and to labor, to the earth 
and the human swarm it bears ; primroses strewed every 
inch of ground under the boughs of the pine-woods; and 
the light of the young year was on the solitary hills and 
ravines as Erceldoune rode once more into Moldavia, 
through the same defile where his assassins had waylaid 
him. 

He checked his horse, and wondered if the horrors of 
that wild night had been all a dream, as he looked down : 
the tumbling water glistened in the sunlight, the grass 
had grown in ranker luxuriance where the good bay was 
laid in her last resting-place ; over the place where he had 


THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. 


75 


fallen, bright clusters of spring flowers blossomed among 
the moss ; two records of the night’s work alone re- 
mained ; the black and broken pine trunk that had been 
flung across the road, and had only been now lifted to one 
side, and a dark crimson stain, where the granite rock had 
been soaked and crusted with his life blood, too deeply 
for even the snows of winter wholly to wash out the shade 
it left. The most thoughtless man would have felt some 
shadow of earnestness steal on him in such a place, with 
such a memory ; Erceldoune, though used to meet death in 
every shape, and too habituated to danger to ever feel its 
terror, let the bridle slacken on his stallion’s neck, and 
gazed down on the wild ravine round him, with something 
of solemnity upon him — had the shot been one hair’s 
breadth nearer his heart, he had now been rotting there 
with his dead horse ; had she who had come as his guard- 
ian angel been one instant later, his eyes had now been 
blind to the light of the sun, and his life numbered with 
the vast nameless multitudes of the grave. 

It was a strange unreal knowledge to the man in whose 
veins life swept with such eager vivid force, and in whose 
every breath and every limb strength was so vital, that life 
and strength both seemed eternal.* 

It was very still, here in the depths of the Danubian 
defile; and in the flood of sunset light he seemed to see 
the face of the woman he had lost. Ilis heart went out 
to her with a futile, passionate longing; the pine-boughs 
that bent over him had shadowed her, the water that 
foamed at his feet had been touched by her hand ; here his 
head had rested on her bosom, here his eyes had looked 
upward through the mists of agony to hers. The very 
grasses whispered of her; the very rocks were witness of 
his debt to her ! 

In madness with himself, in passionate thought of her, 
he dashed the spurs into his horse’s flanks, and swept, full 
gallop, down the steep incline. Was this Love ? 

For a woman seen but twice, for a mere memory, for 
a loveliness, fugitive, nameless, dreamlike, mourned and 
lost 1 

In the first spring-time of the year, Holy Mother Ver- 
onica sat in her pleasant little chamber, which was paneled 


IDALIA. 


»6 

with maple wood, and filled with early flowers, and delicate 
carvings, and the soft-hued heads of saints, and had as 
little of conventual gloom as though it had been a boudoir 
in a chateau rather than an Abbess’s “cell” in Monastica ; 
for they are no ascetics, but enjoy life in their way, those 
innocent, childlike, sunny-natured nuns of Moldavian Mon- 
astica. 

Mother Veronica sat in deep thought, the sun upon her 
silvered hair, primroses and an antique vellum “ Horae ” 
lying together in her lap — the fresh gifts of Nature with 
the worn manual of Superstition — venerable and happy in 
her serene old age. The primroses were untouched, the 
missal lay unread, Mother Veronica was looking out at the 
blue mountain line, and thinking of the stranger to whom 
she had felt almost that mother’s tenderness which her life 
had not known, though in her eyes he was godless and a lost 
soul, a grand Pagan whom it was hopeless to save : think- 
ing wistfully, for she believed that on earth she would 
never see him again. Suddenly she heard in the convent 
aisle without, the iron ring of a tread more like that of the 
Knights Templar, who had once held Monastica, than like 
the subdued slow step of her order ; — she started and list- • 
ened ; could it be that the Virgin had heard her prayers, 
and allowed her to see the heathen who was, perchance, so 
wrongly dear to her ? She hardly hoped it ; yet she 
listened with longing anxiety. It was very sinful to so 
wish to behold the mere mortal life of a heretic I 

But that he was such an infidel, Mother Veronica wholly 
forgot when the door unclosed, and a Sister ushered in 
Erceldoune. 

“Ah, my son, the blessing of Heaven rest on you !” 
cried the Abbess, stretching out her hands with fervent 
welcome. “ I never thought to see you here again. It is 
good — very good — to have remembered us, and come back 
from your great world to Monastica !” 

“Far from it, madam,” answered Erceldoune, bending 
lower to the simple venerable woman than he had ever 
bent to the patrician coquettes of Liramar. “ It would 
be sorely ungrateful if I could enter Moldavia without 
seeing those to whom I owe it that I am not now rotting 
in its pine- woods ” 


THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. 


77 


“And you are recovered — entirely?” 

“Entirely. My strength is wholly returned.” 

Her hands still holding his, Mother Veronica drew him 
nearer to the light, looking upward at him with as much 
pride and tenderness as though he had been her son by 
blood instead of by the mere title of the Church; then a 
sudden remembrance lightened her aged face and sunken 
eyes with all the innocent eagerness of a life which lives in 
solitude, where each chance trifle is a rare and wondrous 
event. 

“Ah ! my son — I forgot — I have so much to tell you. 
I have seen the woman of your picture 1” 

“You have! And she ?” 

“ She saved your life, — yes ; but it is all so strange ! 
Listen — I will tell you ” 

“ Do, for God’s sake ! And she ?” 

“ Oh, my son, do not take a holy name in vain for a 
woman’s perishable beauty I” said Mother Veronica, with 
plaintive reproof, while Erceldoune crushed his heel into 
the maple-wood floor in a sore effort to contain his soul in 
patience. “ It was about a month ago that a Salutation 
to the Virgin, to which, as you know, strangers come 
sometimes from Piatra, even sometimes as far as from 
Ronan and Jassy, I lifted my eyes during the service — 
I cannot tell how I came to do so wicked a thing — and 
I saw — ah! I thought I should have fainted! — in the 
shadow of another aisle, living before me, the glorious 
beauty that you painted in our altar-piece ! I never sinned 
so deeply in my life before, but, though I never raised my 
eyes again, I thought of nothing but her all through the 
mass. If she tempted me so, how must she have tempted 
the souls of men ! She is more lovely even than your 
portrait ” 

“But her name — her country?” broke in Erceldoune, 
impatient^. “Why have withheld from me that she ” 

“ My son, I will tell all I know if you do not hasten 
me,” pleaded Mother Veronica. “When the Salutation 
was over, Sister Eunice came and told me that a lady 
sought to see me ; I bade her bring her here, and it was 
here I saw her — the woman of your picture, with those 
deep marvelous eyes, and that hair which is like light 


78 


ID ALIA. 


All ! how wicked it is that a mere earthly beauty of form 
can touch us and win us as can never all the spiritual 
beauty of the saints. One sees at once that she is of noble 
rank, and young, but she is a woman of the world — too 
much a woman of the world 1 She apologized to me with 
a proud grace that the base born never can have, my son 
(though we ought to believe that the Father has made all 
equal), and said she came to ask about a stranger who had 
been succored by us in the autumn, and been cured of 
dangerous wounds; had he suffered much — had he been 
wholly restored ? Then I knew that what we had deemed 
delirium had been the truth, and that this was she who 
had saved you; but I said nothing of that, only answered 
her fully of your illness and of your cure, and then added 
to her, as it were carelessly, that in your convalescence 
you had painted an altar-piece for Monastica — would she 
like to see it? She assented — she has a voice as low and 
rich as music — and I led her to the chapel, and pointed to 
the Virgin’s altar, where it hangs. She went forward — • 
and I saw her start ; she gave a stifled cry, and then stood 
silent. She could not but see that it was her own beauty. 
I let her stand awhile, for I thought she was agitated ; 
then I went forward, and said to her, ‘He who painted 
that picture, my daughter, when he left it with me, said, 
•‘If you ever see a woman whose portrait you recognize in 
it, she will be the woman to whom I first owed the rescue 
of my life. Tell her Fulke Erceldoune waits to pay his 
debt.” My daughter, you are she.’ Her lips quivered a 
little though she answered me coldly. ‘He said that? 
How could he have known ? — how could he have remem- 
bered V 1 How well he remembered, my daughter,’ I 
answered her, ‘his painting says. Your words confess 
that you first saved this stranger’s life ; why conceal so 
noble an act of mercy V She turned her eyes on mine, 
half mournfully, half haughtily. ‘I had due reason. It 
was little that I did for this English traveler. My hound 
led me to him, and I found him, as I supposed, dying — left 
for dead, doubtless, by some forest brigands. I did what 
I could to revive him — it was scarce anything to name — 
and sta} 7 ed with him while I sent my dog to bring assist- 
ance. That was all; it merited no gratitude, and I had 


THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. 


*9 


do thought that he would ever know it, since he was un- 
conscious all the time I watched him.’ * But you were in 

peril, my daughter? If the brigands had returned 1 

Ah, my son, if you could have seen the proud beauty of 
her face as she smiled on me ! ‘ Is life so beloved a thing, 

that we must be too great cowards to chance its loss when 
another is in extremity, and needs us?’ The words were 
so courageous, and yet so mournful ! She is as beautiful 
as the morning, but I fear she is not happy. ” 

Erceldoune paced the little chamber to and fro for a 
second, his arms folded, his head bent, his heart moved to 
a strange softness and pain that his life had never known ; 
then he paused abruptly before the Abbess. 

“ Her name! Tell me her name!” 

“Alas, my sen ! I cannot.” 

“ Cannot ! Great Heaven! you never let her go un- 
known ?” 

“ Do not be angered, my son. It was not in my power 
to prevent it; she chose it to remain secret. All I know 
is, that she let fall a gold perfume-box as she left my cell, 
and that as I lifted it, and sent Daughter Virginia with it 
after her, I saw engraven on the lid one word only — 
* Idalia.’ ” 

“ Idalia !” 

He repeated the word with passionate tremulous eager- 
ness ; it seemed to him the sweetest poem poets could ever 
dream, the fairest echo that ever the world heard, the 
treasury of all that womanhood could give of beauty, 
grace, and love, that single Greek name of the woman he 
pursued ; yet, — it could serve him in nothing. 

“Idalia! — Idalia! That will do nothing to find her? 
Oh, my God ! she is lost to me as she was lost in Sicily !” 

The words were more full of bitterness than any she had 
ever heard wrung from him by his physical anguish, while 
he paced up and down the narrow chamber. 

“ It is very strange ; but indeed it was no fault of mine,” 
pleaded the Abbess, a little piteously, for she saw that it 
was a heavy blow to him, and she dreaded alike to see the 
pain or the wrath of that unchastened Pagan nature before 
which the Mother Superior, used only to deal with and 
chasten or solace the untroubled souls of guileless women, 


80 


ID ALIA. 


whose heaviest sin was an omitted prayer, felt helpless. 
“And perhaps it is for the best that you should not know 
where to seek her, for hers is a wondrous sorcery, and it 
might be a fatal snare ; if it is such a delight of the eyes 
to me, what might it be to you? It is not well to see 
anything of a mere human earthly charm so glorious as 
that.” 

Erceldoune stretched his hand out with an irrepressible 
gesture. 

“ But surely you told her, at the least, how great I held 
the debt I owe to her ? — how deeply I felt her humanity, 
her heroism, her self-devotion to a stranger ? How ” 

“ I told her, my son, that in all your delirium you spoke 
but of her, and that on awaking to consciousness your 
first question was for her, even as the first effort of your 
strength was to paint her own loveliness upon the canvas; 
and she heard me silently, and seemed profoundly moved 
that you should have thus remembered her,” pursued inno- 
cent Mother Veronica, placidly, unwitting in her serenity 
that she was but “ heaping fuel to the burning,” while 
where Erceldoune leaned in the shadow his face flushed 
hotly again. Spoken out in the calm words of the 
Superior, his passionate memory of an unknown woman 
looked more wild and more tender than he liked that any- 
thing of his should look. “I spoke of you as I felt,” 
went on Mother Veronica ; “and she seemed to like to 
hear all, which was but natural, since she saved your life, 
and found you so cruelly injured in the forest; though she 
said that you owed her little, and that the dog had done 
more for you than she had. She looked long at the paint- 
ing. ‘ The English stranger has honored me too much,’ 
she said at last ; ‘ and so, holy mother, have you. The 
portrait — my portrait — should not be chosen for any altar- 
piece. Hang it, rather, in the shadow, with that Guido’s 
Magdalen.’ And with those words, my son, she bade me 
farewell ; aud I felt, all sinful though it was to feel such a 
thing for a mere mortal creature, as though the light had 
suns out of Monastica when she was gone. Ah 1 just 
such beauty must have been the beauty of the glorifled 
Dorothea, when she brought the summer roses aud tho 
golden fruit of Paradise at midnight to the stricken unbe- 
liever I” 


THE WISDOM OF MOTIIER VERONICA. 


81 


Erceldoune stood long silent, leaning agaiLst the em- 
brasure, with his head bent ; except under the immediate 
impulse of passion, many words were not natural to him. 

“ Is she married ?” he said, suddenly, after a lengthened 
pause. 

“ I cannot tell, my son. She said nothing of herself. 
Her dress is rich, her manners noble. I know no more. 
She had many rings upon her left hand ; one of them 
might be her marriage ring. That she is not happy, I am 
certain. ” 

Erceldoune crushed a bitter oath to silence. Not even 
to know this of her 1 

“ Can I see the picture in the chapel ?” 

“ Surely, my son. Do we not owe it to your art and 
your gift ?” 

His step woke the hollow echoes of the arched aisles as 
it rang on the stone pavements, and he passed into the 
chapel, far famed through all the Danubian Principalities 
for its antiquity, its riches, and its architecture, which 
closely resembled that of the Bohemian Chancery at 
Vienna. It was cool and dark and still, the glass stained 
with deep and glowing hues, the lofty arches stretching 
on till they were lost in gloom ; and the face of his own 
painting, with its brilliant light, looked down like that of 
an angel from out the depths of shade. Thus had he seen 
her, — and seen only to lose her once more, — in the violet 
shadows and the falling night of the Sicilian seas. 

Erceldoune stood there long, and in silence, as before 
him a Templar, leal to his monastic oath through half a 
lifetime, might have stood before the same altar, seeing in 
the virginal beauty of some sacred artist’s painted thought 
only the loveliness of the woman before whom the asceti- 
cism of the soldier, priest, and anchorite had flung down 
sword and shield and cross, and bowed and fallen. 

The Abbess Veronica looked at him with an earnest sad- 
ness, then went and laid her hand on his arm : 

“ Do not think so much of her, my son ; it may be she 
is not worthy of it. A beauty divine she has; but it is 
not always in those of fairest form that the divine spirit 
rests. There is mystery with her; and where there is mys- 
tery, my son all is not well. I doubt me if she be what 
F 


82 


IDALIA. 


you deem her. The belladonna is beautiful, but living in 
darkness, and loving the shade, it brings only poison and 
death. Take to your bosom that flower alone, which lives 
in the clearness of light, and folds no leaves unopened 
from your eyes.” 

He gave a movement of impatience, but he answered 
nothing : it was not in him to take shelter beneath denial, 
when to give the lie would have been to lie, and he turned 
and walked up and down the aisle, where, a few months 
before, the living presence of the woman he sought had 
been, his tread re-echoing through the silent chapel, in 
which the step of man had never been heard since the days 
of the Temple Knights. And as he went, pacing slowly 
to and fro in the religious solitudes, he saw nothing but 
the face above the Virgin’s altar — the face of the woman 
on whose heart he had rested, from whose hand he had 
drunk the living waters of life, and yet who was lost to 
him — a stranger and untracked — in the wide wilderness of 
the world. 

He stayed that night at Monastica. 

The nuns were innocent as children, and though reluct- 
ant to receive a male guest, entertained him cheerfully, 
once admitted. He was reluctant to leave the place 
where at least one could speak to him of the woman 
whose memory was so dear, where at least her presence 
once had been, and still seemed to him to sanctify the very 
stones that she had trodden. Mother Veronica made him 
welcome with almost a mother’s devotedness ; this strong, 
fiery, lawless heathen, as she held him, had grown very 
dear to her, and having eased her conscience by warning 
him, she could no longer resist the temptation, so strong 
in a monotonous and one-idea’d life, of dwelling on the 
romance and mystery of the single episode which had 
broken the even tenor of her days. He listened over and 
over again to the same words, never wearying of them, for 
he was in love with his own ideal as utterly as any lad of 
twenty. In the pause between her religious services, in 
the hush of the spring-tide, while she walked with him in 
the still convent gardens, and at the supper she shared 
with him in her pretty little cell, with its maple wood, its 
sunny pictures and its fresh primroses, that had nothing 


THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. 


83 


of the recluse, as the meal had nothing of the ascetic in 
its frothing chocolate, golden honey, milk-white cakes, 
dainty river fish, and newly laid eggs, the Abbess spoke 
incessantly and garrulously of but one theme. She did 
penance for the indulgence every ten minutes, it is true, by 
a gentle little pleading sermon against the desire of the 
eye, the perishableness of earthly beauty, and the danger 
of erring idolatry; but the penance done, she perpetually- 
nullified it by dwelling, in all her'innocent unwisdom, on 
every grace, on every word, on every charm of the woman 
against whom, nevertheless, she tenderly warned him. 
Every syllable she uttered heightened a hu-ndredfold 
the sorcery which his lost savior’s memory had for him, 
and all her simple warnings drifted past his thoughts un- 
heard. A child’s hand will sooner stop the seas, when 
they rise in their wrath, than counsels of caution or of pru- 
dence arrest the growth of a great passion. 

“Idalial” 

That solitary word seemed all he could see or hear as 
he sat in the twilight, while the mist slowly stole over the 
bright primroses, the sculptured ivory Passion, and the sil- 
ver I. H. S. that glistened on the draperies of the Mother 
Superior’s peaceful altar, as it had once done on the laba- 
rum of the Constantines. 

“ Idalia 1” 

It seemed to fill the night, that single name of the 
shadow he pursued, as Erceldoune stood on the balcony 
that ran round the convent, alone, while all around him 
slept, while the great forests stretched away on every side 
into the darkness, burying in them the little Swiss-like 
chalets, in each of which there dwelt, according to Molda- 
vian custom, one nun alone ; safe in that lonely wilder- 
ness, though with no guardian but her own sanctity. 

The stars were bright, the murmurs of innumerable tor- 
rents filled the silence, the heavy odors of a million pines 
rose up from below, and over the far Danubian plains the 
woods trembled as though stirred by the shadowy hosts of 
Persian myriads and of Scythian chiefs, of Roman legions 
and of Avar hordes, whose bones had whitened in their 
eternal sands, and whose graves were locked in their fune- 
real depths. It was profoundly still, while from the con- 


84 


ID ALIA. 


rent tower the midnight strokes fell slowly, beating out 
the flight of Time, that in its merciless eternal movement 
had left of the Great King but the writing on the wall, 
but the mute story of Assyrian stones; and that had 
swept down, like insects of a summer day, the mailed and 
mighty cohorts who once had passed the windings of the 
Ister, with the shouts of “Ave Csesar Imperator !” proudly 
heralding the passage of the last Constantine. Where were 
they — the innumerable Peoples of the Past ? 

Where were they ? — bright Greek and delicate Persian, 
ravening Hun and haughty Latin, swift Scythian and 
black-browed Tartar, brute Mogul and patrician Roman, 
whose bones lay buried there, unmarked, unparted, in the 
community of the grave ? 

The Danube rolled along its majestic waters, while cen- 
turies and cycles passed ; sweeping onward under the same 
suns that once flashed on the diadem of Darius ; flowing 
in solemn melody through the night under the same stars 
which the wistful eyes of Julian once studied in the still 
lonely watches of his tent. The river was living still, dark 
and changeless, rushing ever onward to the sea; but they, 
the fleeting and innumerable phantoms, the Generations 
of the Dead, were gone for evermore. 

As he stood there in the midnight solitude, it seemed to 
him as if, in the midst of his virile and adventurous life, 
he suddenly paused for the first time, and thought itself 
paused with him ; it was because he was, for the first time, 
a dreamer — for the first time a lover. 

Something of melancholy, of foreboding, were on him ; 
the world for once seemed weary to him ; he wondered why 
men lived only to suffer and to die. In all his years before 
he had never felt this; they had been filled with rapid ac- 
tion and vigorous strength, finding their joys in the close 
conflict of peril, in the mere sense of abundant and pow- 
erful life, in the victories of an athlete wrestling breast to 
breast with the lion or bear, and in the swift sweep of a 
wild gallop through jungles of the tropics, or cold crisp 
dawns of northern moorlands. Now he knew that his life 
was no longer under his own governance ; now he knew 
that the vague fantasy of a baseless dream was dearer to 
him than anything the earth held. It had its sweetness 


THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. 85 

and its bitterness both: she lived; she had remembered 
him ; she was not happy; this was all he knew, but it was 
enough to fill the night with her memory, and from those 
brief words to build a world. 

His imagination had never awakened before, but now his 
fancies thronged with dreams, wild as a youth’s, vague as a 
poet’s, and dazzling as 

Fireflies tangled in a silver braid. 

Thus, before him, in the Danubian solitudes, once the bat 
tie-field of nations, the Persian of the Immortal Guard 
had thought of some gazelle-eyed Lydian, seen once, never 
to be forgot, in the Temple of the Sun ; the wild Bulga- 
rian had felt his savage eyes grow dim with tears of blood 
when the Byzantine arrow pierced his breast, and he re- 
membered some Greek captive, loved as tigers love, who y 
never again would lie within his arms, and to whose feet 
he would never bring again the pillage of the palace and 
the trophies of the hunt; the Roman Legionary leaning 
on his spear, on guard, while the cohorts slept in their 
black frozen camp, had dreamed of a gold-haired barba- 
rian far away in the utmost limits of the western isles, 
whom he had loved under the green shadows of fresh Bri- 
tannic woods, as he had never loved the haughty Roman 
matron who bore his name where tawny Tiber rolled. 
Thus, before him, men had mused, in those forsaken soli- 
tudes, of the light of a woman’s smile, of the softness of 
a woman’s memory, where, standing in the silence of the 
night, he heard the fall of the torrents thunder through 
the stillness, and watched the black pines tower upward 
into the starlighted gloom. Nations had perished on 
those shadowy battle-plains; but the same river rolled un- 
changed, and unchanged the same dreams of passion 
dreamed themselves away. 


8 


86 


IDALIA. 


CHAPTER VII. 

THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY. 

It was midnight and midwinter in Paris, snow lying 
thick on the ground ; dead lying thick in the Morgue ; out- 
casts gnawing the bones dogs had left, and shivering or 
church steps built by pious crowds, who glorified God and 
starved their brethren; aristocrats skimming over the ice, 
flashing their diamonds in the torchlight, warm in their 
swansdown and ermine ; wretches who dared be both poor 
and honest, sleeping, famine-stricken, under bridge-arches, 
as such a twin insult to a wise world deserved ; philoso- 
phers, male and female, who were vile, and got gold, and 
joliment jouaient leurs mondes , drinking Cote and Rhine 
wines, and laughing at life from velvet couches. It was a 
bitter icy night, and the contrasts of a great city were at 
their widest and sharpest, as the chiffonnier searched in 
the snow for offal as treasure, and the Princess lost in the 
snow, as a mere bagatelle, wealth in an emerald that would 
nave bought bread for a million ; as a young child, half 
naked, sobbed, homeless, under the pitiless cold, and a 
State Messenger, wrapped in furs, was rolled in his travel- 
ing carriage through the bright gaslit streets. The Royal 
Courier was lying, stretched nearly at length on his car- 
riage-bed, while he dashed through the capital full speed, 
not losing a moment to get through to Persia. 

There was plenty of time to sleep while the train tore 
through the night to Marseilles, and he raised himself on 
his arm and looked out at the old familiar, welcome streets 
of Paris ; a mistress for every new-comer, a friend to every 
well-worn returning traveler, a syren ever fresh, ever dear, 
ever unrivaled. As he did so, the carriage was passing 
down the Rue Lepelletier and before the Opera, where the 
doors had just opened for one of those balls to which all 
Paris proper (or improper) flocks. The throng was great ; 
the wheel of his carriage nearly locked in another, whose 


THE BADGE OF THE SILVER I~Y. 87 

gas-lamps, flashing off the snow, lighted up the face of a 
woman within, with the azure of sapphires glancing above 
her brow. The Queen’s Messenger starred up from his 
carriage-couch and threw himself forward ; his postboy 
saved the collision, his horses dashed on without a pause. 

He flung himself back among his furs, with a fierce bit- 
terness in his soul : 

“ Good God, again ! — and there /” 

The carriage whirled on, leaving the masked throng's to 
flock to the wild Rigolboche of the Opera. 

That night under the glitter of a chandelier in the Hotel 
Mirabeau, before a fire which flung its warmth over the 
green velvet and walnut wood, the ormolu and silver, the 
mirrors and consoles of the chamber, two men sat smoking 
over claret and olives, having dined alone, by a miracle, in 
the midst of the laughing, dazzling, contagious gayeties of 
peopled Paris. In these days confederates meet over 
liqueurs and cigarettes, instead of in subterranean caverns; 
and conspirators plan their checkmates in the coffee-room, 
an opera-box, or a drive to an imperial stag-hunt, instead 
of by midnight, under masks, and with rapiers drawn. 

One of the men was Victor Vane, the other that dashing 
Free Lance, that Monodist of the Sugared Violet, that 
political brigand of the Carpathian Pass, to whom the 
telegram had been addressed as to the Count Conrad Con- 
stantine Phaulcon : a man in physical beauty, physical 
prowess, talent, wit, and bearing, far the superior of the 
Englishman, yet whom the latter dominated and held in 
check, simply by that fine and priceless quality, which is 
colorless because inscrutable, and irresistible because pr6- 
voyant — Acumen. It crowns genius, and dethrones kings. 

Socially, there was the same anomaly between them. 
Vane, of whose antecedents none knew very much (except 
that his mother had been a Venetian, wedded, but not of 
very fair fame, and his father a decayed English gentle- 
man, chiefly resident in Naples, both of whom had been 
dead long ago), with no title, with no connections with a 
somewhat notorious association with the ultra parties of 
Southern Europe, and with no particular quality of social 
distinction beyond his perfect breeding, his scientific whist, 
and his inimitable tact, was, nevertheless, leen at all courts 


88 


IDALIA. 


save those of Vienna and the Vatican, and had made him- 
self not only received, but welcomed in many of the best 
families and highest sets in all countries. Phaulcon, on 
the other hand, in whose veins ran blood of purest Hel- 
lenic breed, who could trace his chain of descent unbroken, 
who had a marvelous beauty, a marvelous grace, and a 
marvelous tact, with many other gifts of fortune and na- 
ture, was contraband of courts, had long since been exiled 
from “good society ;” and wa3 considered, rightly or 
wrongly, to belong to the Bohemian class of Free Lances, 
the Chevaliers d’Industrie of politics, the wild lawless 
Keiters of plot and counterplot, of liberalism and intrigue, 
who are the abomination of the English mind (which com- 
monly understands not one whit about them), and are the 
arch disturbers of continental empires, where the peoples 
recognize at the bottom of all their schemes and crimes 
the germ and memory of one great, precious, living truth 
and treasure — Liberty. At the core, both these men were 
as deeply dyed, and as utterly unscrupulous, the one as 
the other, the only difference being that the one was the 
more wilily dangerous, the other the more visibly lawless; 
both deserved equally to be out of the presence-chamber of 
princes and the pale of aristocratic cliques, yet Vane was 
accepted as a man of fashion by the most fastidious, Phaul- 
con was excluded by the least fastidious, as among the 
“ equivocal.” What made the difference ? 

Victor would have told again, with his charming low 
laugh, that when quiet on his lips was always in his sunny 
eyes, which dazzled women and never met men fairly — 
“Acumen !” 

“ I cannot imagine how you could miss him !” he was 
saying now, breaking a macaroon, with a slight superb 
disdain in his tone, as of a man who never missed any- 
thing. 

“How should I know?” cried Phaulcon, with petulant 
impatience. “ We fired half a dozen balls at him, the 
man fell dead, never stirred, never breathed ; who on the 
face of the earth could imagine he was going to get up 
again ?” 

“ Carissimo,” said Vane, with soft persuasion. “ Why 
will you persist in that most deleterious habit of trusting 


THE BADGE OP THE SILVER IVY. 


89 


to chance, and satisfying yourself with ‘ appearances ’ and 
with ‘beliefs’? Nothing more fatal. Always make sure. 
Just a farewell plunge of an inch of steel into the aorta* 
and you are always certain.” 

The picture-like beauty of Phaulcon’s face reddened 
with a momentary flush, and he tossed back his long hair. 

“ Parbleu ! one is not an assassin ?” 

“ Since when have you discovered that ?” 

The flush grew darker on Count Conrad’s forehead ; he 
moved restlessly under the irony, and drank down a draught 
of red fiery Roussillon without tasting it more than if it 
had been water. Then he laughed ; the same careless 
musical laughter with which he had made the requiem 
over a violet — a laugh which belonged at once to the 
most careless and the most evil side of his character. 

“ Since sophism came in, which was with Monsieur 
Cain, when he asked, ‘Am I ray brother’s keeper ?’ It 
was ingenious that reply; creditable to a beginner, without 
social advantages. ‘An assassin V Take the word boldly 
by the beard, and look at it. What is there objection- 
able ?” 

“Nothing — except to the assassinated.” 

“It has had an apotheosis ever since the world began,” 
pursued Phaulcon, unheeding, in his bright vivacity. “Who 
are celebrated in scripture ? Judith, Samuel, David, Moses, 
Joab. Who is a patriot ? Brutus. Who is an immortal ? 
Harmodiusand Aristogiton. Who is a philosopher ? Cicero, 
while he murmurs ‘ VixeruntV after slaying Lentulus. Who 
is a hero ? Marius, who nails the senators’ heads to the 
rostrae. Who is a martyr? Charles, who murders Straf- 
ford. What is religion? Christianity, that has burnt and 
slain millions. Who is a priest? Calvin, who destroys 
Servetus; or Pole, who kills Latimer, which you like. 
Who is a saint? George of Cappadocia, who slaughters 
right and left. Who is a ruler? Sulla, who slays Ofella. 
Who is a queen ? Christina, who stabs Monaldeschi ; 
Catherine, who strangles Peter ; Isabella, who slays Moors 
and Jews by the thousand. Murderers all ! Assassination 
has always been deified ; ard before it is objected to, the 
World must change its creeds, its celebrities, and its chron- 


IDALIA. 


^0 

icles. ‘Monsieur, you are an assassin,’ says an impolite 
world. 1 Messieurs,’ says the polite logician, ‘ i found my 
warrant in your Bible, and my precedent in your Brutus. 
What you deify in Aristogiton and Jael, you mustn’t 
damn in Ankarstrbm and me.’ Yoila! What could the 
world say?” 

“ That you would outwit Belial with words, and be- 
guile Beelzebub out of his kingdom with sophistry,” 
laughed Yane, with a quiet lazy enjoyment. <4 Caro, 
caro ! with such exquisite subtleties in speech, how is it 
that you are so uncertain in acts, so rash even occasion- 
ally, and so — -just now and then — so weak?” 

Phaulcon laughed too. 

“ Because, intellectually, I am quite a devil, but morally, 
perhaps, keep a pin’s point of humanity still. I am 
ashamed of it, but what would you have ? Achilles could 
be shot in the heel.” 

And there was the very slightest shadow of bitterness in 
the words, which showed that there was a “ pin’s point,” 
too, of truth in them. Yane looked at him with his quiet 
amusement undisturbed. 

“And your delicate susceptibilities will let you shoot a 
man but not stab him? What an artist’s eyes for imper- 
ceptible shades of color 1” 

And it was with that gentle mocking banter that he had 
killed — perseveringly and remorselessly killed — any linger- 
ing touches of nobler things, any stray instincts toward 
holier impulses, that he had found in that unscrupulous, 
brilliant, lawless Free Lance, who laughed now with an 
evil glitter in his eyes, and a sense of ridicule and shame 
for the single impulse that had moved him with something 
true and human. 

“Madre di Christo! shot or steel, I would have given 
him either willingly enough when he outwitted us. Curse 
him ! if ever we come across each other, it shall go worse 
with him for that trick.” 

“ Oh no,” interposed Yictor, languidly. “ No, certainly 
not, let him alone. Never kill save when there is neces- 
sity; besides, any row between him and you might draw 
attention to that little affair, and though we must make 
the sacrifice of those unpleasant trifles to la haute politique. 


THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IV t. 


91 


it does not do for them to get wind. They do not dream 
we were in it. They have plenty of toy-terriers, and yap- 
ping puppies, and truffle-dogs with a good nose for a per- 
quisite at the English Foreign Offlce, but they have no 
bloodhounds in the bureau — they can’t track. Apropos 
of tracking — I tell you who I wish were more completely 
pledged to us ” 

“ Lilmarc, of course. So do I, but he is caution itself ; 
and I believe, on my faith, that a white wand at Vienna 
would buy up what little Magyar spirit there is in him. 
He is a fox, with the heart of an ape 1” 

Lilmarc was the Graf von Lilmarc, an Hungarian noble 
of splendid possessions, and of wavering allegiance — now 
to Austria, and now to his Fatherland. Vane trifled 
gravely with his olives. 

“ But Lilmarc has one weakness — women. Cannot the 
Countess Vassalis seduce him?” 

Phaulcon gave a despairing shrug of his shoulders. 

“ There is no reliance on women ! I don’t know what 
has come to Idalia of late ; she is not herself, and is oftener 
dead against us now than anything else. I have asked her 
to make play with Lilmarc ; she might have him in her 
hands like wax in no time, but she will not; she is way- 
ward, cold, haughty ” 

“ Perhaps she has taken a lover you know nothing 
about,” said Victor, with a smile in his eyes. He liked 
his friend and confederate as well perhaps as any one in 
the world, but he liked better still tormenting him. 

The blood flushed Phaulcon’s forehead. 

“ If I thought that ” Then he laughed the melodi- 

ous laugh which was in harmony with the reckless poetic 
grace of the man’s beauty. “Oh, no! She only sees 
through us, and has found out that our sublime statue of 
Liberty has very clay feet. Moitie marbre et moitie boue f 
as Voltaire said of the Encyclopedic.” 

“ Why do you let her see the clay feet, then ?” 

“ Why ? Idalia is not a woman that you can blind. 
You have not seen her.” 

“Unhappily, no! I have heard men rave of her, as 
they never raved of anything, I think ; and I know how 
madly they have lost their heads for her — to our ad- 


92 


IDA LI A. 


vantage. Miladi’s loveliness has done more for the cause 
than half our intrigues. She is now at Naples?” 

“ She was; to-night she is in Paris.” 

“ In Paris ?” 

“ Yes; I thought you knew it ? In half an hour I am 
going back to take her to the opera ball. Lilmarc is sure 
to be there, and she must beguile him out of his reticence 
and caution if she can ; there is not a better place for en- 
ticing Tannhauser into the Yenusberg than en domino in 
an opera box, while all the world is going mad below.” 

“j D’avance, I am jealous both of Lilmarc and of you!” 
cried. Yane, with that easy worldly serenity to which such 
a normal and barbaric passion as jealousy seems wholly 
antagonistic and impossible. “At last I shall see her, 
then — your beautiful Yassalis! Shall I come with you?” 

“ No ; better come up to the box when Lilmarc is not 
there. If he saw you with her he might take fright and 
cry off ; if you have an ivy spray at your button-hole she 
will understand and admit you, whether I be there or not. 
Here !” With the words he opened a small, long bonbon- 
box he took from his coat, and tossed Yane one of the 
little sprays of silver ivy that it held — the badge which all 
those who would be recognized by Idalia, Countess Yas- 
salis, must wear on their dominoes that night. 

“ Thanks,” said Yictor, as he slipped it in his waistcoat- 
pocket. “ I shall be there by one o’clock at latest. Idalia 
— this wonderful Idalia ! — how often I have missed her, 
how often I have longed to see her; the fairest con- 
spirator in Europe !” 

The Bal de l’Opera was brilliant, crowded, dizzy, mad 
with the very insouciant and reckless gayety of the Prince 
who invented it, as though the spirit of Philippe d’Orleans 
still presided over the revelries. Dominoes here, dominoes 
there ; gold spangles, silver spangles, rose and white, blue 
and amber, violet and gray, scarlet and black, mock jewels 
flashing like suns and glancing like stars, “ debardeurs ” 
and “grands bebes ,” Pierrots and Scaramouches, white 
shoulders and black masks, fluttering rosettes and dainty 
signal-roses, were all pell-mell in glittering tumult and con- 
tagious riot ; and Yane, in a domino of imperial blue, with 
the silver ivy spray fastened on his shoulder, made his way 


THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY. 


93 


through the crowd, not dancing, not heeding much the in- 
vitations, mockeries, and whispers of a score of charming 
masks, but looking incessantly upward at the boxes. 

He did not see what he looked for ; but he did see 
every now and then, till they had numbered more than a 
dozen, on an Ottoman, on a Knight of Malta, on a 
Pharaoh, on a Poissarde, on a black domino, on a scarlet, 
on a purple, on a violet, the little spray of ivy like his 
own, that had come out of Phaulcon’s bonbon-box. 

“ Che, che, ch-e-e !” murmured Victor, with the southern 
expletive. “ Miladi Idalia will have a large gathering. 
Is she as beautiful as they say? — one would think so, to 
judge by her power. ” 

He got as much out of the press as he could, and moved 
on in silence, heeding nothing of the cancan deafer and 
chaine da diable dancing round him. Ho was not a man 
who cared for noisy dissipations ; they had no sort of at- 
traction for him ; indeed, dissipation at all had not much, 
unless it were associated with the intricacies of intrigue. 
He cared for nothing that was not ruse; his own life was 
emphatically so ; he had begun it with serious disadvant- 
ages : first of birth, which, though gentle on one side, was 
not distinguished ; of fortunes which were very impover- 
ished ; of prospects which were absolutely nil ; of a world 
in which he had no place, and which had no want of him; 
of a temperament that was intensely ambitious, intensely 
dissatisfied, and intensely speculative. Despite all these 
drawbacks, by dint of tact and finesse, he had now, when 
he was but thirty, moved for many years in some of the 
best society of Europe; he lived expensively, though he 
was very poor ; and he was deferred to, though no one 
could have said why they gave him such a preference. He 
had the spirit of the gambler, with the talent of the states- 
man, and he found the world one great gaming-table. He 
could not be a statesman in his own country ; England 
will not accept as statesmen what she is pleased to term 
'‘adventurers,” whereby she loses all men of genius, and 
gets only trained men of business : hence he had thrown 
himself, partly in pique, more in ambition, into the interests 
of a certain ultra political party abroad. Bred in Venetia, 
ne hated Austria with a cold but very virulent hatred. 


94 


ID ALIA. 


Rash only in the height and. unscrupulousness of his ambi- 
tions, he adopted politics — or, perhaps, to give them their 
true and naked name, conspiracies — as the scaling ladder 
for his own advancement. If all the waters round him 
were lashed iuto a tempest, he knew so cautious and tried 
a swimmer as himself would have a fair chance to come 
uppermost while other men went down. He loved intrigue 
for mere intrigue’s sake, and power for the simple pleasure 
of holding it. Serene, sunny, impassive, and even indiffer- 
ent iu bearing, and, indeed, in temperament, he could seize 
savagely, and hold pitilessly. In deceiving any one, Yane 
had no sort of scruple — it was only an artistic kind of ex- 
ercise ; but kill anybody, or provoke anybody, he would 
not think of doing — it was a barbaric, blundering style of 
warfare. He never went out of hi3 way in wrath ; but all 
the same, he never missed his way to revenge. He had a 
good deal of ice in his nature ; but it was, perhaps, the 
most dangerous of ice — that which smiles in the sun, aud 
breaks, to drop you into the grave. In the world of fashion, 
Victor was but a man of fashion — popular, very successful 
with women, an admirable tactician, and a guest who 
brought his own welcome everywhere by his easy social 
accomplishments, and his languid gentle temper, which had 
over and over again smoothed a quarrel, prevented an em- 
barrassment, hushed a provocation unuttered, and arranged 
a misunderstanding before it grew to a rupture. In that 
world unseen, which revolves under the rose, he was very 
much more than this, and had a sway and a place of con- 
siderable influence in a society of politicians whose mem- 
bers are in all classes and orders, and whose network 
spreads more widely and finely beneath society than society 
dreams, stretching from Paris to Sicilia, and from the 
Quadrilateral to the Carpathians, in their restless scheming 
for the future, and their plans for the alteration of the map 
of Europe. It was not, however, of the French in Home, 
the White Coats in Venice, the Muscovites in Warsaw, or 
the state of siege in Galicia, that he was thinking now, as 
he went through the wild, panting, crushed crowd of 
dancers at the French Opera; it was of something me 
fairer, if equally dangerous — a woman. 

“ Is she here ?” he asked a violet domino, who wore?, 
I’ke himself, the badge of silver ivy. 


THE BADGE OF TnE SILVER IVY. 


95 


“ No. Perhaps she will not come, after all I” 

44 Oh yes, she will.” 

44 How do you know ? Have you seen her ?” 

44 No, I never saw her. But Conrad has been dining 
with me, and left me to go and fetch her.” 

The violet domino went on, without a word. 

44 He’s in love with her, too ; he can’t speak of her with- 
out a tremor in his voice ; and by his voice he is nobody 
less than Prince Carlo himself,” thought Vane, glancing 
back at his silver ivy, in apprehension lest it should be torn 
off or stolen in the press. “What can her power be ? Ah, 
bah ! What was that of the L’Enclos ? Nobody knew, 
but nobody resisted.” 

And he went on, humming to himself Scarron’s quatrain : 

“Elle avait au bout de ses manche's, 

Une paire do mains si blanches ; 

Que je voudrais en verity, 

En avoir 4t e soufflet^!” 

“Ah 1 there she is I” 

The stifled exclamation fell on his ear, low spoken but 
impulsively passionate, as only a lover’s entranced recogni- 
tion is. He turned, and saw a mask in Venetian costume, 
to whose shoulder was also fastened the little badge of ivy. 

“One of us I Who, I wonder ? He, too, cannot speak 
of her without betraying himself,” thought Victor, as he 
swung round quickly, and glanced over the boxes. In one 
of them he saw what he sought: with black laces and 
azure silks sweeping about her, caught here and there with 
sprays of silver ivy, a woman masked, who, leaning her 
arm on the front of the box, and her cheek upon her hand, 
gazed down into the tumult of color and of movement that 
made up the ball below. Her face was unseen, but the lips, 
exquisite as the lips of a Greuze painting, had a certain 
proud weariness on them ; and in the bright richness of her 
hair, in the elegance of her hand and arm, in the languor 
and grace of her attitude and her form, there were suffi- 
cient sureties of the beauty that would be seen if the black 
mask that veiled it were removed. 

The Venetian domino looked at her long, then, with a 
stifled sigh, turned away. 

44 You have loved her ?” whispered Vane. 


ID ALIA. 


9G 


The domino started, and glanced at the ivy branch on 

Victor’s arm. 

“ To my cost,” he said bitterly, as he plunged among 
the whirling dancers, and was lost in the spangled and 
riotous multitude. 

His hearer smiled. A woman who owned a limitless 
power, and was unscrupulous, and without pity in its use, 
was, perhaps, the only woman he was capable of respect- 
ing. Cold as he was, and but little accessible to anything 
of passion, for which his blood ran too suavely and too 
tranquilly, he felt something of warm, eager curiosity sweep 
over him, and his pulse beat a shade quicker with a new 
expectation. He had long heard of this sorceress — he had 
never seen her ; and he threaded his way with impatience 
through the Arlequins, Pierrots, masks, and costumes, till 
he reached the' stairs, and mounted them lightly and rap- 
idly toward the box, opened the door, and entered. 

It was filled with dominoes, all decorated with the silver 
spray, and all bending toward her with eyes that told their 
admiration through their masks, and voices that murmured 
flatteries, homage, and wit — to an inattentive ear. She 
lifted her head, and turned slightly as the door unclosed ; 
her eyes dwelt on him through her mask, noting the badge 
he wore. She bowed languidly. 

“ Enter, monsieur.” 

And Victor Vane, all-impassive diplomatist, all-rusd 
man of the world though he was, felt a thrill run through 
him, and a hot breath seem to pass, sirocco-like, over his 
life, as he heard the nameless magic of that melodious 
lingering voice, and found himself, for the first time, in the 
presence of that Queen of the Silver Ivy, who was known 
as — Idalia. 

Could Erceldoune have seen afar as Surrey saw his mis- 
tress, the magic glass would not have brought him such 
secure and happy peace as came with the vision of Geral- 
dine. Late into the dawn as the night express plunged 
through the heart of France downward to where Marseilles 
lay beside the southern sea, through the cold clear night, 
the plains white with sheeted snow, the black and spectral 
woods, and the sleeping hamlets, with the pointed towers 
of chateaux and manoirs rising against the leaden clouds, 


THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY. 


97 


behind him the City that Julian loved sparkled under a 
million lights ; strangely altered since the days when Julian 
wrote in adoring phrase of the studious and tranquil re- 
tirement of his austere and beloved Lutetia. The bright 
tide of Parisian life was at its gayest in the first hours of 
the midwinter morning; and in one of its richest quarters 
an opera-supper was at the height of its wit and of its 
brilliancy. The guests had come from the Opera ball, the 
dominoes, sparkling with silver violets, gold bees, diamond 
clusters, and glittering stars, were tossed down on the 
couches with the Venetian masks ; being no tinsel costumes 
of the Passage des Panoramas, hired for a night, but the 
silk and satin elegancies of a court costumier, for men who 
wore these trifles at the masked fetes of the Tuileries, in 
the Colonna palace in Carnival, and at the Veglione with 
noble maskers of Florence. The supper-room was a long 
and handsome chamber, hung with rose silk, flowered with 
silver, with crystal chandeliers, flashing globes of light, 
and with a meal of the choicest extravagance on the table, 
about which half a dozen men and but one woman were 
gathered. 

She — alone there at the head of her table, with her 
bouquet lying idly by her little army of deep claret-glasses, 
broad champagne goblets, aud tiny spiral mousselines for 
liqueurs — was well worth a host of women less fair. Marie 
de Rohan — when Buckingham and Holland and Lorraine, 
and all that glittered greatest at two Courts were at her 
feet, and even the Iron Cardinal, in the censure of his 
blackest enmity, could not wholly keep his eyes from being 
dazzled by the shine of the arch-intriguer’s golden hair — 
was not more beautiful than she. Many would have added, 
also, that the Duchesse de Chevreuse was not more dan- 
gerous. 

That her form and her face were perfect, was not half nor a 
tithe of her resistless charm ; it lay in still more than these, 
in every glance of her eyes, blue-black like the gazelle’s, in 
every slight smile that crossed her proud lips, in all the sun- 
lit luster on her hair, in all the attitudes of her southern 
grace, in every movement, accent, and gesture of one who 
knew to its uttermost the spells of her power, and was used 
to have that power courted, flattered, and obeyed. Her 
G 9 


98 


ID ALIA. 


loveliness was very great ; but, great as it was, it was com- 
paratively forgotten beside so much that was of still rarer 
fascination; the patrician ease, the silver wit, the languor 
and the laughter, the dignity and the nonchalance, the 
brilliance and the eloquence which turn by turn gave their 
changing sorcery to her. The innocence and fawn-like 
shyness of a young girl in her earliest spring may be charm- 
ing in a pastoral, but in real life they are but awkward 
and tame beside the exquisite witchery, the polished insou- 
ciance, the careless disdain, the cultured fascination of a 
woman of the world. And these were hers in their utmost 
perfection ; a woman of the world she was in the utmost 
meaning of the words, and all of victory, of power, and of 
beguilement that the world could give were added to the 
beauty of Idalia, Countess Yassalis. 

Men passing her in the open air gazed after her, and 
felt a sudden giddy worship for what they only saw one 
moment to lose the next ; men who held themselves, by 
age or coldness, steeled to all the glamour of her sex, fell 
before her; a few low lingering words from her lips, a 
breath of fragrance from her laces, the disdain of her deli- 
cate scorn, the caress of her soft persuasion, the challenge 
of her haughty indifference, the sorcery of her sovereign 
smile, these at her will did with men as they would ; in- 
toxicated them, blinded them, wooed them, bound them, 
subdued their will, their honor, and their pride, fettered 
their senses, broke their peace, gave them heaven, gave 
them hell, won from them their closest secret, and drew 
them down into the darkest path. A power wide and 
fatal — a power that she was said, and justly, to have used 
with little scruple. Who was she — what was she, this 
beautiful enchantress ? 

In one word she was — “Idalia.” 

Her supper-room, perfumed, mellowly lighted, served 
without ostentation or display, yet, in truth, as extrava- 
gantly as any Court banquet, with summer fruits though it 
was midwinter, with wines Imperial palaces could not have 
eclipsed, with hookah-tubes curled through the arms of the 
lounging chairs, and lazily floating in their great bowls of 
rose-water, was sought with that eagerness for the entree 
which is only found when — for far different attractions — • 


THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY. 


99 


men seek either the salons of a Princess of the Ton or of 
an Empress of the Demi-Monde, the legitimate leader of 
the Aristocracies, or the yet more potent lawgiver, Ano- 
nyma. There was a cosmopolite gathering about her table ; 
the Prince of Yiana, a Neapolitan ; the Count Phaulcon, 
a Greek ; the Graf von Lilraarc, a Hungarian ; the Mar- 
quis de Beltran and the Marechale d’lvore, both of Paris ; 
and one Englishman, Victor Vane. Here, at three o’clock 
in the morning, with the wine just flushing their thoughts 
with its warmth, and the scented smoke of the narghilis 
curling out in languid aerial clouds, they supped & la Be- 
gence with one of the fairest women of her time ; and she, 
lying back, with her Titian-like draperies, floating out like 
the deep-hued plumage of some tropic bird, toying with her 
bouquet of rose japonicas, stooping her lips to the purple 
depths of her Rousillon or the light sparkles of her Mo- 
selle, giving her smile to one, her wit to another, letting 
the wine steal the caution from their speech and the fra- 
grant vapor charm the secrets from their heart, knew that 
her beauty drew them down into its charm and chain, her 
creatures and her captives, and let the revelry flash on 
around her, brilliant as the aiglettes in the discarded domi- 
noes; and, while they supped with her in the dawn of the 
Paris morning, weighed them each and all — at their worth. 

Like the jewels that glistened above her fair forehead, 
they had no value in her eyes save this — what they were 
worth. 

Yet, if ever there were on any face, there were in hers, 
a haughty power in the arch of the classic brows, a gen- 
erous grace in the smile of the proud lips, a fearless dig- 
nity in the gaze of the long lustrous eyes : looking on her, 
he who should have had force to resist her beauty would 
have still said, “ If this star have fallen from heaven, it is 
great still even in its fall.” 

The Lost Pleiad of fable may sink downward through 
the darkness of an eternal night, and become one of the 
women of earth, earth-stained, earth-debased, but the light 
of forgotten suns, the glory of forsaken worlds, will be 
upon her still. It might be so here. 


100 


IDALIA 


CHAPTER VIII. 

“passion born op a glance.” 

With his rifle resting against his knee, its butt bedded 
in the moss, Erceidoune sat alone a few months later on, 
in the warm Turkish night, on the Bosphorus shores. 
He had been shooting sea-gulls, jackals, or a stray hill 
deer, if such came within range, through the last half of 
the day, while waiting for return dispatches in Constanti- 
nople, and was now resting on a boulder of rock under a 
cypress, in his white burnous and sun-helmet, the Monarch, 
a fine English chestnut, straying loose at his side, a pile of 
dead game at his feet, and the starlight full on hi3 face, as 
his eyes looked seaward thoughtfully. 

A year had gone by since he had stood before the altar- 
piece in Monastica, and he was no nearer to either aim of 
his twofold quest. Power, patience, vigilance, inquiry — 
all had failed to bring him on the track of his assassins; 
masked nobles, reckless adventurers, political secret agents, 
whichever they were, they had had wit and wisdom to or- 
ganize their plot so that no trace was left of it and them, 
and they were beyond all reach of justice, as it seemed, for- 
ever. And of the woman, to whom his only clew was the 
fairness of her face, he had learned nothing. Shadowy, 
fugitive, lost in mystery, fantastic as a madman’s dream, 
the hold she had gained upon his thoughts was so utterly 
foreign to them that it was the stronger once admitted 
there. Speculation was wholly antagonistic to him — his 
nature was forcible, single, vigorous ; that he acted greatly 
when great occasions arose, was due to the mould in which 
his character was naturally cast, not to any premeditation 
or previous contest and sifting of principles ; he lived, as 
all bold men do, meeting accident or emergency as it came, 
content with the activity of the present, looking very rarely 
to anything past, never to anything future. To sift moral 


“passion born of a glance. ” 101 

problems, to torture himself with theoretical questions, 
was what would no more have occurred to Erceldoune 
than to have sat twisting ropes of the Bosphorus sand; 
hence the poetic unreality of the memory which possessed 
him was so abhorrent and antagonistic to his whole tem- 
perament that it gave a deeper coloring to his life, once 
received, than it would have done to any other to which it 
had been less alien. Mental disquietude, moral tumult, 
were unknown to him ; a shadowy pursuit, a speculative 
meditation, were no more in consonance with his character 
than it would have been to study the stars for Chaldean 
knowledge of things obscure. Therefore it was with the 
stronger force and the more unbelief that Erceldoune felt 
that a well-nigh mythical mystery had power over him, and 
touched his heart, and stirred his thoughts, as no living 
woman had ever done through the varied course of his life. 

So sacred had the vision of his ministering angel be- 
come to him, so intimately interwoven with holiness, lofti- 
ness, purity, with the compassion of the luminous eyes, 
and the hush of the convent solitudes where her picture 
hung, that to have seen her at the entrance of the Opera 
had given him a sharp and unwelcome recall to the fact of 
how utterly he followed — a phantom; how utterly he 
knew nothing of the woman who had wound herself it to 
his thoughts. 

The face which he had seen in the haze of golden light, 
in what he had deemed his dying hour, the loveliness that 
he had found afresh, only afresh to lose it, in the softness 
of the Sicilian seas, among the heat, the noise, the mark- 
ers, the false brilliants, false flowers, false laces, fVlse 
beauty of the Rigolbochade ! — it gave Erceldoune a bitter 
revulsion. True, there might be nothing in it to do ao ; 
she might go thither, not to the lawless whirl of the stage, 
but simply to the boxes as a spectator of the scene below; 
he knew this was common enough with the proudest and 
purest of women. Still, it revolted him ; his memory of 
her, his belief in her, was as of a life as unlike, and as 
above the world, as the stars that shone now across the sea 
above the classic shores where old Olympus rose. It was 
an instinct, an impulse, a folly, never analyzed, only feelt ; 
but to think of her, in the gas and throngs of the m&oked 

9 * 


102 


IDALIA. 


midnight gathering, had given him much such a shock as 
an artist, soul-devoted to his art, would feel if he could 
come suddenly on a Raphael or Correggio Madonna made 
the sign and center of a riotous casino, or flung by a 
drunken soldier as worthless loot into the flames of a 
bivouac fire. This woman, all unknown though she was, 
had become the single poetic faith, the single haunting 
weakness of a passionate and earnest temperament, of a 
changeful and self-sustained life ; to have seen her at the 
Bal de POpera grated jarringly on both. 

He thought of it now— and the thought was full of tem- 
pestuous pain to him ; to find in her a leader of the artifi- 
cial worlds of fashion ; a coquette, worn, brilliant and chill 
as her own diamonds, with every smile a beautiful lie, with 
every glance a demand for accustomed homage, would be 
scarce better than to find in her one of the cancan wor- 
shipers of the Opera throng, a debardeur in rose and sil- 
ver, laughing through her velvet mask of Venice 1 Of all 
places, of all hours, were there none in the width of the 
world, in the vastness of time, to have found her in at the 
last than at midnight in the Rue Lepclletier ! Who was 
she ? What was she ? — this phantom which pursued him? 
lie woudered restlessly, as he did often in lonely moments 
like these, while he sat looking down the Bosphorus as the 
lights gleamed in the distance among the cypress and 
orange groves of the city of the Moslem, and the far-off cry 
of the Imaum wailed deep and mournful through the si- 
lence, chanting the evening prayer of the Faithful. 

As he sat thus he did not notice or hear a man approach 
him on horseback, riding slowly along the sea shore, un- 
armed, and lightly chanting a little French air — a hand- 
some, careless, graceful Greek, whose saddle reveries 
seemed of the lightest and brightest as he swayed a bunch 
of Turkish lilies idly in his hand. His roan mare’s hoofs 
— she was a Barbary — sank noiselessly in the sands ; and 
Erceldoune did not lift his head ; he sat motionless under 
the cypress, resting on his rifle, with the starlight falling 
fitfully on the white folds of the Arab cloak and the Rem- 
brandt darkness of his face, as his head was bent down and 
his eyes gazed seaward. The rider came nearer, the hoofs 
still noiseless on the loose soil j and the hummed song on 


“passion born op a glance.” 103 

his lips broke louder, till he sang the words clearly and 
mellowly on the air, in the mischievous truth of Dufresny’s 
chanson : 

“Deux dpoux dit un grand oracle, 

Tout d’un coup deviendront heureux, 

Quand deux 6poux, pas un miracle, 

Pourront devinir veufs touts deux!” 

The voice fell on Erceldoune’s ear, rich, harmonious, 
soft as a woman’s contralto — the voice that had given the 
word to “ kill the Border Eagle.” He started to his feet, 
flinging batik his burnous; in the silvery silent Eastern 
night they met once more — and knew each other at a 
glance : there is no instinct so rapid and so unerring as the 
instinct of a foe. With an oath that rang over the silent 
seas, EreeMoune sprang forward, as lions spring, and cov- 
ered him with his rifle ; swift as an unconsidered thought, 
Phaulcon wheeled and dashed his spurs into his mare’s 
flanks, which sprang off at a headlong gallop a hundred 
paces in advance by that second’s start : in an instant the 
other caught at the loose rein of his English horse, flung 
himself into saddle at a leap, and tore down the Bos- 
phorus shore, his rifle leveled, the bridle between his teeth, 
the Monarch racing at full speed. They were in chase — 
the pursuer and the pursued. 

“Halt ! — or you are a dead man.” 

The challenge rolled through the night out and away to 
the Bosphorus ; — the sole answer of the Greek was to dash 
the rowels again into his roan’s sides, and tear on without 
other thought than flight, tasting all the long bitterness of 
death with every time that the beat of the gallop grew 
closer behind him, with every moment that the shriek ot 
the bullet might whistle down on the wind and the shot 
pierce his heart from the hand he had once thought picked 
bare to the bone by the vultures, and buried safe in Mol- 
davian snows. 

The blood coursed like fire through Erceldoune’s veins, 
every muscle in him strained like those of a gallant hound 
in chase ; he longed, as the hound longs, to be at the 
throat of his flying foe : he had a mortal debt to pay, and 
a deadly wrath to pay it with ; the life of his murderer lay 
at his mercy, and he panted — with brute thirst, perhaps— 


104 


ID ALIA. 


to take it, and trample it out on the sands in a just and 
pitiless vengeance. Yet — he did not fire. 

All that was boldest and truest in him refused to let him 
do as he had been done by; — forbade him to shoot down 
an unarmed man. 

With the hoofs now thundering loud on barren rock, now 
scattering in clouds the loosened sand, now trampling out 
the fragrance from acres of wild myrtles and basilica, he 
rode on in hot close chase, the bridle held in the grip of his 
teeth, his rifle covering his assassin, while Conrad Phaulcon 
fled for his life. A single shot, from an aim which never 
missed, and the coward would be slain as he would have 
slain, would die the death that he would have dealt ; a sin- 
gle ball sent screaming, with its shrill hiss, crash through 
his spine, and he would drop from the saddle dead as a 
dog. The Greek knew that as well as the man who held 
his life in his hands, to take it when he would ; and the 
sweat of his agony gathered in great drops on his brow, 
the horror of his death-blow seemed to him to quiver already 
through all his limbs, and as he turned in his saddle once — 
once only — he saw’ the stretching head of the Monarch 
within fifty paces, the face of his pursuer stern and dark as 
though cast in bronze, and the long lean barrel of steel 
glistening bright in the moonlight, lifted to deal him the 
fate he had dealt. 

Onward — while the chant of the Muezzin grew fainter 
and fainter, and the lighted mosques of Stamboul were 
left distant behind ; onward — through the night, lit with 
a million stars, and all on fire with glittering fire-flies; 
onward — down the beach of the luminous phosphor- ra- 
diant sea, along stretches of yellow sand, under beetling 
brows of granite, over rocky strips foam-splashed with 
spray, through fields of sweet wild lavender and roses 
blowing rich with dew, and tangled withes of tamarind ten- 
drils, and myrtle thickets sloping to the shore, and netted 
screens of drooping orange boughs, all white with bloom ; 
onward they sw r ept — hunter and hunted — in a race for life 
and death. 

The Greek was always before him ; now and again they 
well-nigh touched, and the foam from his horse’s bit was 
flung on the steaming flanks of the mare he chased; now 


“ PASSION BORN OF A GLANCE.” I 05 

and again the dull thud of the hoofs thundered almost side 
by side as they scattered sand and surf, or trampled out 
the odorous dews from trodden roses. His enemy’s life 
lay in the hollow of his hand ; he saw the womanish 
beauty of Phaulcon’s face, all white and ghastly with a 
craven terror, turned backward one instant in the light of 
the moon, and a fierce delight, a just vengeance heated 
his senses and throbbed in his veins. He panted for his 
foe’s life, as he hunted him on through the hot Asian 
night, as the lion in chase may pant for the tiger’s ; all the 
passions in him, rare to rise, but wild as the wildest tem- 
pest when once roused, were at their darkest, and the creed 
which chained them, and forbade him to fire on a man un- 
armed, served but to make each fiber strain, each nerve 
strengthen, with the fiercer thirst to race his injurer down, 
and— side to side, man to man — hurl him from his saddle 
and fling him to earth, held under his heel as he would 
have held the venomous coil of a snake, imprisoned and 
powerless, till its poisonous breath was trodden out on the 
sands. 

They rode in hard and fearful chase, as men ride only 
for life and death. 

The surf flashed its salt spray in their eyes as they 
splashed through the sea-pools girth deep in water ; star- 
tled nest-birds flew with a rush from bud and bough, as 
they crashed through the wild pomegranates ; white- 
winged gulls rose up with a shrill scream in the light of 
the moon, as the tramp of horses rang out on the rocks, 
or scattered the sands in a whirling cloud. There was a 
savage delight to him in the breathless ride, in the intoxi- 
cation of the odors trampled out from trodden roses and 
crushed citrons, in the fierce vivid sense of living , as he 
swept down the lonely shore by the side of the luminous 
sea, hunting his murderer into his lair ; — the wolf in its 
own steppes, the boar in its own pine-forests, the tiger in 
the hot Indian night, the lion in the palm plains of Libya; 
he had hunted them all in their turn, but he had known no 
chase like that he rode now, when the quarry was not 
brute, but man. 

The snorting nostrils of the Monarch touched the 
flanks of the straining Barbary, the hot steam of the one 


106 


IDALIA. 


blent with the blood-flaked foam of the other. They 
raced together almost side by side, dashing down a pre- 
cipitous ridge of shore, entangled with a riotous growth 
of aloes and oleander: Ereeldouue saw his assassin was 
making for some known and near lair, as a fox hard 
pressed heads for covert, and ho thundered on in hotter 
and hotter pursuit, till the steel of the rifle glittered close 
in Count Conrad’s sight as he turned again, his face livid 
with terror, and the breath of the horse that was hunting 
him down scorching and noxious against his cheek, like 
the breath of the bloodhound on the murderer’s. There 
were barely six paces between them, crashing headlong 
down the sloping ridge, and through the cactus thickets ; 
as he turned backward, with that dastard gesture of piti- 
ful despair, they looked on one another by the white light 
of the moon, and the womanish fairness of the Greek’s 
face was ghastly with a coward’s prayer, and the dark 
bronze of his pursuer’s was set in deadly menace, in Gerce 
lust of blood. Phaulcon knew why , with that lean tube 
flashing in the starlight, he was still spared ; he knew, too, 
that once side by side in fair struggle, he would be hurled 
from his saddle, and crushed out under a just retribution, 
till all life was dead, as pitilessly, as righteously as men 
crush out the snake whose fangs have bit them. 

And the pursuit gained on him. Ereeldouue rode him 
down, dashing through the wilderness of vegetation, with 
the surf of the sea thundering loudly below, and a loath- 
ing hate, a riotous joy seething through his veins. The 
horses ran almost neck by neck now, nothing between 
them and the billows lashing below but a span’s breadth 
of rock and a frail fence of cactus. One eflbrt more, and 
he would be beside him ; the wild bloodshot eyes of the 
mare were blinded with the foam flung off the Monarch’s 
curb, and his own arm was stretched to seize his assassin 
and hurl him out to the waters boiling beneath, or tread 
him down on the rock under his feet, while he wrung out 
his confession in the terror of death. He leaned from his 
saddle ; his hand all but grasped his enemy in a hold 
Phaulcon could no more have shaken off than he could 
have the grip of an eagle, or the fangs of a lion : he was 
even with him, and had run him to earth in that wild night 


“passion born op a glance. ” 107 

race down the Asian shore. Then — suddenly, with a 
swerve and a plunge as the spurs tore her reeking Hanks — 
the mare was lifted to a mad Jeap, a wall of marble gleam- 
ing white in the starlight, and rising straight in face of the 
sea; she cleared it with a bound of agony, and the dull 
crash that smote the sileuce as she fell, told the price with 
which she paid that gallant effort of brute life. His foe 
was lost ! 

A tierce oath broke from his lips and rang over the seas. 
As he put the Monarch at the leap, he reared and refused 
it; a second was already lost, an eternity in value to him 
whom he pursued. His face grew dark — ail that was worst 
in him was roused and at its height ; he wheeled the hunter 
and rode hirn back, then turned again and put him full 
gallop at the barrier, nursing him for the leap ; the marble 
wall rose before them, clothed with the foliage of lig and 
tamarisk trees ; he lifted the horse in the air, cleared the 
structure, and came down on the yielding bed of wild gera- 
nium that broke the sheer descent. 

On the ground lay the Barbary mare, panting and quiv- 
ering on her side : the saddle was empty. 

A darkness like the night came upon Erceldoune’s face 
as he saw that his enemy had escaped him — a darkness 
closely and terribly like crime on his soul. 

Wolf, and boar, and lion, he had chased them all to their 
lair, and brought them down, now and again, a thousand 
times over, by the surety of his shot, by the victory of his 
strength. His secret assassin hunted and run to earth, at 
his mercy aud given up to his will through the whole length 
of that race down the Bosphorus waters, had outstripped 
his speed, had baffled his vengeance, and was let loose 
again on the world with his name unconfessed, with his 
brute guilt unavenged, lost once more in the solitudes of 
the night, in the vastness of the Ottoman empire ! A 
second more, and his hand would have been at the throat 
of this man : he would have hurled under his feet the 
dainty silken beauty of the coward who was thief and mur- 
derer in one, and would have crushed the truth from his 
throat and the craven life from his limbs under the iron 
grind of his heel, giving back vengeance as great as his 
wrongs. A second more, and the traitor who had laughed 


108 


IDALIA. 


with him in good fellowship in the Parisian cafd, and 
butchered him in cold blood in the Danubian solitudes, 
would have answered to him for that work. Now the 
Barbary mare lay riderless at his feet, and before him, 
around him, stretching dim in the distance, were thickets 
of myrtle, labyrinths of cactus, dense groups of oleander, 
of palm, of pomegranate, where his quarry had headed for 
a known covert, or had found one by chance, and from 
which it was as hopeless to draw him again as to unearth 
a fox once outrun the hounds’ scent, or pursue a stag that 
had once swam the loch. 

A curse broke again from Erceldoune’s lips, that the 
distant wail of the Imaum seemed to mock and fling back, 
as he rode the Monarch headlong down into the wilderness 
of shrubs and flowers, trampling the boughs asunder, crush- 
ing luscious fruit and odorous blossom under the horse’s 
hoofs, searching beneath the shadows and under the tangled 
aisles of foliage for the dastard who must be refuged there ; 
one dusky glimpse of a crouching form, one flash of the 
starlight on a hidden face, and he would have fired on him 
mow without » moment’s check ; his blood was up, his 
passions were let loose, and the Greek might as well have 
sought for leniency from the jaws of a panther as for 
mercy from Erceldoune then, had he ridden him down in 
his cover and dragged him out in the still Eastern night. 

He rode furiously, hither and thither, through the 
thickest glades and where the shadows were deepest, 
searching for that to which he had no clew, in chase of a 
quarry which every turn he missed, every clump of shrubs 
he passed, every screen of aloes whose spines his horse 
refused to breast, might hide and shelter from his ven- 
geance. Nothing met his eye or ear but the frightened 
birds that flew from their sleep among the piles of blossom, 
and the shrill hi$s of the cicada, scared from its bed in the 
grasses. In the leafy recesses and the winding aisles of 
those hanging gardens overlooking the Bosphorus, a hun- 
dred men might have been secreted, and defied the search 
of one who was a stranger to the ground, and was cheated 
at every turn by. the fantastic shadows of the moonlight 
and the palms. His foe had escaped him ; before the dawn 
broke he might have slipped down to the shore and be far 


11 PASSION BORN OF A GLANCB.” 109 

out at sea beyond the Dardanelles ; or if the gardens were 
the known lair for which he had purposely headed in the 
race along the beach, he would be safe beyond pursuit 
wherever lie made his den. 

Erceldoune dropped the bridle on the chestnut’s neck, 
and let him take his own pace ; a terrible bitterness of 
baffled effort, of foiled wrath, was on him — a passion, like 
a weapon which recoils, hits the one who holds it hard. 
This man’s life had been in his hands, and had escaped 
him ! — and the unexpiated vengeance rolled back on his 
own heart, fierce, heavy, dark, almost as though it were 
twin crime with what it had hitherto failed to punish. A 
night-assassin, only of the viler stamp because of the gen- 
tler breed, went through the world unbranded and unpun- 
ished, while honest men died by the score of cold and fam- 
ine in the snows of Caucasus and the streets of cities ! 
Erceldoune’s teeth ground together ; when they met again, 
he swore it should be for shorter shrive and deadlier work. 

The Monarch, with his head drooped and the steam 
reeking from his hot flanks, took his own course over the 
unknown ground, and turning out of the thickets, paced 
down a long winding aisle of cedars : the night was per- 
fectly still, nothing was heard but the surgingof the Bospho- 
rus waters, nothing was stirring save the incessant motion of 
the fire-flies, that sparkled over all the boughs with starry 
points of light. Erceldoune had no knowledge where he 
was, except that the sea was still beside him, and he let 
his horse take his own way. Suddenly, through the dark 
masses of the cedars, a light gleamed, which came neither 
from the fire-flies nor from the moon, but from the Turkish 
lattice-work of a distant casement. 

Was that where his foe had found covert? He raised 
the Monarch’s drooping head with the curb, and urged him 
at a canter down the cedar- aisle, the noise of the hoofs 
muffled in the grass, that grew untrimmed, as though the 
wild luxuriance of the gardens had long been left un- 
touched. Sultan’s palace, Queen’s serail, sacred Mosque,, 
or Moslem harem, he swore to himself that he would break 
down its gates, with the menace of England, and have his 
murderer delivered up to him, though he were surrounded 

10 


110 


IDALIA. 


bj; an Emir’s eunuchs or harbored in the sanctuary of the 
Odd itself. For anything that he knew, the light might 
glitter from the dwelling where his enemy and all his gang 
had made stronghold, or the place might swarm with Mus- 
sulmans, who would think there was no holier service to 
Allah than to smite down the life of a Frank, or the lat- 
ticed window might be that of a seraglio, into whose ande- 
run it was death for a man and a Giaour to enter. But 
these memories never weighed with Erceldoune : he was 
armed, his blood was up, and, if his foe were sheltered 
there, he vowed that all the might of Mahmoud, all the 
yataghans of Islam, should not serve to shield him. 

A flight of steps ending the cedar-walk stopped the 
chestnut’s passage ; above ran a terrace, and on that ter- 
race looked the few lattice casements allowed to a Turkish 
dwelling, whose light from within had caught his eyes. 
He threw himself out of saddle, passed the bridle over a 
bough, and went on foot up the stairs. Erceldoune’s rifle 
was loaded; he had on him, too, the hunting knife with 
which he had grallocked the hill deer ; and he went straight 
on — into the den of the assassins, as he believed. Fool- 
hardy he was not ; but he had found sinew and coolness 
serve him too well in many an avatar , east and west, not 
to have learned to trust to them, and he had resolved, 
moreover, to go through with this thing cost what it might, 
bring what it would. 

lie hurried on the terrace, laden with the scarlet blos- 
soms of the trumpet-flower and japonica, and heavy with 
odors from the nyctanthus and musk- roses trailing over the 
stone ; a door stood open on to it, leading into the large 
court which forms the customary entrance of a Turkish 
house ; he paused a moment and looked through ; there 
was only a dim light thrown on its walls and floor, and 
there was no sound but of the falling of the water into 
the central fountain. He passed the threshold, and entered, 
the clang of his step resounding on the variegated mosaic 
of the pavement : its own echo was the only sound which 
answered — for its stillness the place might have been de- 
serted. But the court opened into a chamber beyond, 
flooded with warm, mellow light, its dome-like ceiling 
wreathed with carved pomegranates, while another fount- 


“passion born op a GLANCE.” 111 

ain was flinging its shower upward in the center and the 
fragrance of aloes wood filled the air from where it burned, 
like incense, in a brazier; a picture, full of oriental color- 
ing. With his rifle in his hand, his white burnous flung 
behind him, and his single thought the longing which pos- 
sessed him to unearth his foe, and have his hand upon his 
throat, he swept aside the purple draperies that partially 
shadowed the portico, and passed within the entrance. 

A woman rose from her couch in the distance, startled, 
yet with the look of one who disdains to give its reins to fear 
— as a sovereign would rise were her solitude desecrated; 
and he paused, his steps arrested and his passions si- 
lenced, as in ancient days he who came to slay in the dead- 
liness of wrath, uncovered his head, and dropped his un- 
sheathed sword, entering the holy shrine at whose altar his 
foe had taken sanctuary. His enemy was forgotten ; — he 
stood before Idalia. 

He saw her in the flood of amber light that fell upon the 
luster of her hair, on the white folds of her dress with its 
hem of gold, on the scarlet blossom of the roses clustering 
about her feet, on the aromatic mist of the aloe wood 
burning near; — and in an instant he had crossed the mar- 
ble that severed them, his head uncovered, his hand dis- 
armed, his eyes blinded. 

“ At last ! — at last !” 

And he had never known how strong had become the 
power, how eager had grown his quest, of the memory 
which had pursued him, until now, when he bowed before 
her, when his lips were on her hand, when a hot joy that 
he had never known swept through his life, when in that 
sudden meeting his gaze looked upward to the face which 
had mocked him a thousand times, from the blue depths of 
sea waves, in the tawny stretch of eastern plains, in the 
stillness of starry nights and the darkness of convent aisles, 
and now at length was found. 

She drew herself with haughty amazed anger from him : 
— she saw her solitude violated by the abrupt entrance of 
an armed man when the night was so late that the chant 
of the Imaum was calling to prayer : she saw a stranger, 
by his dress an Arab, bend before her in homage that was 
insult. She wrenched herself away, and signed him back 


1 12 


ID ALIA. 


with a gesture too grand in its grace for fear, and in l / 
eyes a glance which spoke without words. 

Then as he raised his head, she saw the features which 
she had last beheld in what had seemed their death hour, 
while up to hers gazed the eyes that but for her succor the 
vulture’s beak would have struck, and torn out forever; 
then she knew him ; — and over her proud loveliness came a 
sudden flush, a softness that changed it as by a miracle ; and 
she looked down upon him with that glance which he had 
seen and remembered through the dizzy mists of delirium, 
and had given to the altar- picture at Monastica. 

“You!” 

It was but one word ; but by that word he knew that as 
he had never forgot, so he had not been forgotten. 

He bentjower yet, till his lips touched her hand again. 

“At last ! I thought that we should never meet ! And 
now — I have no words. To strive to pay ray debt were 
hopeless ; God grant the day may come when I can show 
you how I hold it. You saved my life; you shall command 
it as you will.” 

His words broke from his heart’s depths, and in the 
rapid breathless tide of emotion, strongly felt and hard to 
utter ; few women would have failed to read in them that, 
with his bold, keen, dauntless nature, self-reliant, danger- 
tested though it was, there went a faith that would be 
loyal to his own utter ruin, once pledged and given, and a 
tenderness passionate and exhaustless, through which he 
might be lured on to any belief, dashed down to any de- 
struction. A dangerous knowledge ; there are scarce any 
women to be trusted with it. 

Silence fell between them for the moment, where she 
stood beside the scarlet roses of the fountain, with the 
heavy aloes perfume rising round, and at her feet, bowed 
low before her, the man whose life was owed to her by so 
vast a debt — a stranger and unknown, yet bound to her 
by the golden bonds of service that had loosed and freed 
him from his grave. All the glory of her beauty was 
deepened and softened as she looked on him, startled still, 
and hardly conscious of his words; and Erceldoune gazed 
upward to her face, with a dim mist before his sight, as he 
had never gazed before upon the face of womau : — he had 


tl PASSION BORN OP A GLANCE. ” 113 

forgotten all in that luminance of light, that glow of color, 
that delicious dreamy fragrance. 

Remembrance returned to him as she released her hands 
from his hold, and drew slightly from him. They could 
not meet as strangers, while betwixt them was the tie of a 
life restored, and the memory of that hour of awful peril 
in. which she had been his savior. But he had come, 
ai med and alone, by violent entrance into her solitary cham- 
ber in the lateness of the night ; and on her face was the 
look of one to whom insult was intolerable and all fear un- 
known — then he remembered what had brought him thither, 
and spoke ere she could speak. 

“ Pardon me for the rude abruptness with which I have 
broken on you ; nothing can excuse it save the truth — I 
followed, as I thought, one of my Moldavian assassins ; I 
hunted him down the Bosphorus, and lost his track in the 
gardens here. I fancied •” 

“ Your assassins ? — here ? ” 

“ Doubtless it was an error of mine I” he broke in has- 
tily; that this house could be his murderer’s lair was im- 
possible, since it was hers, and he forebore to tell her how 
closely he had hunted his quarry to her presence, lest he 
should give her alarm. “ 1 rode him down into a wilder- 
ness of palm-trees and cactus, aud missed his trail in the 
darkness — the coward was unarmed, I could not fire on 
him, and he escaped me. I saw a light gleam through the 
cedars ; and I forced my entrance ; then I forgot all — 
even forgot what my own violence must appear — since it 
led me to you !” 

His voice dropped and softened as he spoke the last- 
word ; the pitiless passion which had alone possessed him 
as he had dashed aside the draperies and forced his way 
into what he had believed the covert of the man he hunted, 
were outweighed and forgotten ; even while he spoke he 
had no memory but for her. 

She shuddered slightly, and glanced into the dim twi- 
light gloom of the court on to which her chamber opened. 

“ If you tracked him into these gardens, he may be 
there, or may have hidden here. Search ; — have my peo- 
ple with you — let them take torches, and seek through the 
H 10* 


114 


ID ALIA. 


gardens. No one can have entered ; but the grounds are 
a wilderness ” 

“ More likely he has escaped to the sea-shore ; and all 
I know, or care now, is, that he has served to bring me — 
here / Oh ! my God, if you knew how I have sought 
you ! — and now that we have met, what can I say ? No- 
thing that will not leave me deeper your debtor than be- 
fore.” 

“ Say no more. You owe me nothing. Who would 
not have done for you the little that I did ?” 

“You periled your life to save mine, and mine is owed 
to you if a man’s life was ever owed for angel work,” broke 
in Ereeldoune, while the force of a new and strange soft- 
ness trembled through his voice as he stood alone in the 
stillness of the night with this woman, of whom he knew 
nothing — nothing, save that she filled his soul and his 
senses with a sweet fierce joy that had never touched them 
before, and that he had been rescued from his grave by her 
hand. 

Over her face swept a look almost of pain : 

“ Call nothing 1 did by that name. And — why should 
you feel it as a debt, as a merit even ? A little cold water 
held to a stranger’s lips ! It is not worth a thought.” 

“ It was worth my life, and with my life I will pay it, 
if you will take the payment, be it made in what guise it 
may.” 

They were no empty words of courteous requital ; they 
were an oath to the death, if need be; she was silent, 
while her glance dwelt on him where he stood, reared now 
to his full stature, in the amber flood of the lamps, the 
snowy folds of the burnous flung back, and on his face a 
grandeur from the stormy passions an instant ago lashed 
to their height, blent with the eager light with which he 
looked on her. Then she held her hand out to him, with 
the beautiful impulse of a proud and gracious nature, 
touched and bending with a sovereign grace. 

“ I thank you for your words. There is no question of 
debt now ; they more than pay the little I^could do to serve 
you in your peril. We cannot meet as strangers : let us 
part as friends.” 

The words were, even in their gentleness, a sign of dis 


“passion born of a glance.” 115 

missal. He had broken in on her abruptly, and the night 
was late, ne bowed low over her hand — as we bow over 
that of an Empress. 

“Part! True; I come unbidden here; I have no 
right to linger in your presence ; but we cannot part until 
I know that we shall meet again. I have not found to- 
night what I have sought so long unceasingly and hope- 
lessly, only to-night once more to lose it.” 

She drew back slightly, and her face grew paler, while 
over its brilliance swept a troubled feverish shadow : she 
answered nothing. 

“ You can know nothing of me now, but at least you 
will consent to know more?” he pursued. “A name alone 
tells little ; yet had I had one by which to seek the savior of 
my life, it would not have been so long before you had 
heard mine.” 

In the hot night, in the perfumed stillness, in the sudden 
revulsion from the violence of vengeance to the wild sweet- 
ness of this woman’s presence, words far different reeled 
through his thoughts and rose to his lips ; but they were 
held back by his own sense of their madness, and by the 
dignity, nameless yet resistless, which surrounded her. 

“ You would know my name ? It is Idalia Vassalis.” 

She uttered it almost in defiance, yet a defiance which 
had a profound sadness in it, like the defiance of the slave. 

“And why conceal it so long ? Can you not think what 
it was to owe so great a gratitude to you, yet to be left in 
such strange ignorance of my preserver that, for anything 
which I could tell, we might never have met on earth ?” 

“ I had reasons for desiring my own name untold,” she 
answered, coldly, as though interrogation were unknown 
to her. “ Besides, I never thought that you would have 
any remembrance of me.” 

“ To have lost remembrance I must have lost the life 
you rescued.” 

The brief words said a volume ; she knew they were no 
offspring of hollow courtesy, but a passionate truth broken 
up unbidden from a character in which a bold and noble 
simplicity prevailed over all that the world had taught, in 
motive, in purpose, in action, and in speech ; to under- 
stand her , might for years bewilder and mislead the man ; 


116 


IDALIA, 


to understand him, the few moments of that night sufficed 
to the woman. 

“ It is few remember as you do,” she said, and the soft 
lingering richness of her voice, with an unspoken melan- 
choly vibrating through it, thrilled through him. “ Life is 
no great gift given back to merit gratitude 1 But, while 
we lose time in words, your murderer will escape ; if you 
chased him to these gardens, there is no outlet seaward. 
Take my people with you ; some are Albanians, and will 
serve well and boldly under need ; let the grounds be 
searched, for my safety if not for your own.” 

While she spoke she rang a hand-bell; a negress obeyed 
the summons, an Abyssinian, clothed in scarlet and white. 

“ Bid Paulus and his sons take arms and torches, and 
wait without on the terrace,” said the mistress to her slave, 
who gave the salaam silently, and left the chamber. “ The 
men will be faithful to you,” she resumed to Erceldoune. 
“ Let them accompany you home ; if your assassins be in 
Turkey, the Bosphorus shores cannot be safe for you alone. 
No ; — you will not refuse me ; you can set little store on 
the life you say I gave you back if you would risk it wan- 
tonly so soon.” 

“ My life will be richer and dearer to me from to-night.” 

The words broke from him on impulse and almost una- 
wares, as he bent before her in farewell : he could not 
linger after his dismissal ; to have disputed it would have 
been impossible, for there was about her that nameless 
royalty which is its own defense, and which no man ever 
insulted with impunity, or insulted twice. 

She avoided all notice of his words as she gave him her 
adieu, speaking, as she had hitherto done, in French. 

He bowed over her hand, but he held it still. 

“ And to-morrow I may have permission to return, and 
seek to say all for which I have no words to-night ? The 
debt that you disclaim must, at least, be sufficient bond 
between us for us not to part as strangers ?” 

Looking upward he saw a certain hesitation upon her 
face ; her eyes were suddenly darkened by a shadow it were 
hard to describe, and she was silent. Chivalrous in his 
courtesy to women, pride was too strong in him for him to 


tl PASSION BORN OP A GLANCE.” 117 

sue where he was repulsed, to entreat where he was un- 
desired. He released her, and raised his head. 

“ It is not for me to force my presence on you. Farewell, 
then, and take, once for all, ray gratitude for a debt that 
it has pleasured you to embitter. ” 

The words were proud, but they were also pained ; they 
were the terse, unstudied phrases of a man who was 
wounded, but who could not be lowered, and would not be 
angered ; they served him better, and touched her more 
keenly, than more servile or more honeyed utterances 
would have done. She smiled with a certain amusement, 
yet with a graver and a gentler feeling too. 

“ Nay — you need not read my silence so. Come here 
again — if you wish.” 

Just then the clang of the Albanians- arms announced 
their readiness on the terrace without ; he bowed down once 
more before her, and left her standing there, with the 
clusters of the roses at her feet, and the color of the rich 
chamber stretching away into dim distance around her as 
she had suddenly broken on his sight when he had dashed 
back the purple draperies in pursuit of his assassin. 

And he went out into the night with one thought alone 
upon him ; he felt blind with the glow of the light, intoxi- 
cated with the incense odors, dizzy with all that luster and 
maze of delicate hues, of golden arabesques, of gleaming 
marbles, and of scarlet blossoms ; but what had blinded 
his sight and made his thoughts reel, was not these, but 
was the smile of the woman who had suddenly lit his life 
to a beauty which he had passed through half the years 
that are allotted to man, never having known or cared to 
know. 


118 


ID ALIA, 


CHAPTER IX. 

RITTER TANNHAUSER. 

Op bis foe there was no trace. 

The Monarch stood undisturbed, with the bridle flung 
over the cedar bough, and the Barbary mare lay motionless, 
with her right fore leg twisted under her and broken ; of 
his foe there was no trace ; and he rode on silently down 
the Bosphorus shore back into Pera, with the Albanians 
running by bis horse’s side, their torches throwing a ruddy 
glare over the moonlit sea and silvered sands, and on their 
own picturesque dresses and handsome classic faces, as 
they held on to his stirrup-leather. 

A few moments before, and he had had no thought save 
of the blood-thirst with which he had ridden his enemy 
down the shore, and of the just vengeance of an unpardon- 
able wrong ; now he had no memory save one. 

With the morning he rose, with but this one thought 
still — he would see her again! With the early dawn, 
while the sound of the drums was rolling through the mists, 
as they heralded the Commander of the Faithful going to 
prayer, he was plunging into the gray depths of the Bos- 
phorus: sleep beyond his bidding. He knew that for 
hours yet he could not go to her, but he watched the sun 
in intolerable impatience for it to travel faster on its way; 
he walked alone to and fro the silent shore in a dream that 
was filled with her memory, and dead to all else. He did 
not pause to analyze what he felt, not even to wonder at 
it; his life was launched on the tempestuous sea of passion, 
and he lived in a trance of feverish intoxication, restless 
pain, and sweet idolatry. What avail how great had been 
his strength before ? It only served to fling him down in 
more utter captivity now. 

Far sooner than ceremony would have allowed him, he 
rode down the same path by which he had pursued the 
Greek the night before; but of him he had no more thought 


RITTER TANN HAUSER. 


119 


than if be were blotted from h\s life, when once more he 
looked upon her ; — a woman fitted for a throne. 

She did not give him her hand, but she smiled, that smile 
which gave its light to her eyes } T et more than to her lips; 
and he thought that she must hear the beating of his heart 
— it had never throbbed so thick and fast when he had 
given the word for his own death-shot in the Carpathian 
pass. He had never felt himself stricken strengthless and 
powerless, blind and dizzy with a thousand new emotions, 
as he felt now : — so had another bold Border chief, the 
Night Rider of the Marches, been conquered when Both- 
well stood before his Queen. 

His thoughts were f ull of fever, his life seemed confused 
yet transfigured. To have thrown himself at her feet and 
gazed there upward to her in silence and in worship, would 
have been to follow the impulse in him. She knew it; his 
eyes spoke all on which his lips were perforce dumb; he 
did not think how much they betrayed him, he did not 
dream how much they told — to a woman who had wakened 
so much love that its faintest sign was known to her — of 
the tumult in his heart, of the glory in his life, of the mad- 
ness in his soul, which were so mingled and so nameless to 
himself. 

In that moment, the whole heart of the man, in its brave 
truthfulness, its bold manhood, its headlong faith, and its 
awakening passions, was open before her as a book ; — she 
knew her power over a dauntless, loyal life : how would 
she use it ? 

She let her glance dwell on him for a moment, those lus- 
trous changeful eyes, whose hue could never be told, calmly 
meeting the passion of his own : calmly reading and watch- 
ing the type and the worth of this life, which through her 
was still among the living. 

“ Have you found no trace of your assassin ?” she asked 
him carelessly. “ They told me there were no signs of him 
on the shore last night.” 

“ I forgot him ! I have only remembered that he brought 
me here.” 

“ It is not many who would follow so generous a code 
as yours. You have a deathless memory for gratitude, a 
forgiving oblivion of injury.” 


120 


IDALIA. 


“ Hush ! do not give me credit that is not mine. As 
for gratitude — it is not that only which has made my life 
know no memory save the memory of you 1” 

His voice trembled, the words escaped him involuntarily : 
he was scarcely conscious what he said. She bowed with 
that dignity which repulsed without rebuking the meaning 
of the words. 

“You do me far too much honor. The little I did in 
common human charity merits, as I said before, neither 
thanks nor memory. You stay in Constantinople, I sup- 
pose ?” she continued, with that ease which was almost 
cold — cold, at least, compared to the tumult of impassioned 
impulses, unconsidered thoughts, and newly-born emotions 
which were warm and eager in the heart of her listener. 
It checked him, it stung and chilled him. 

“ I am waiting for home dispatches,” he answered her ; 
“ I am a Queen’s courier, as you may have heard. You 
are living here ?” 

“ Only for awhile ; some months, a few days, I do not 
know which it may be. You, who are so splendid an 
artist, must find constant occupation in the East ?” 

“ I ? I am little of an artist, save when my horse or 
my rifle are out of reach. We, of the old Border, rarely 
carved our names in any other fashion than by the sword.” 

She saw how little his thoughts were with his words, as 
she met again the burning gaze of eyes that told far more 
than he knew; their language was too familiar to her to 
move her as it would have moved a woman less used to 
its utterance ; it was a tale so old to her ! She sighed, a 
little impatiently, a little wearily; she was unutterably 
tired of love. What was intoxication to him was but a 
thousand-times told story to her. And yet — she saw that 
this man would suffer, and she foresaw that he would suf- 
fer through her. She pitied him, as it was not in her 
commonly to pity. 

“ I saw you in Sicily, surely ?” he pursued. “ For one 
moment, as you passed in a lateen-boat ?” 

“ I was in Sicily a year ago ; I dare say you might have 
seen me.” 

“ You travel much ?” 

“ Who does not in our days ?” she answered, with care- 


RITTER TAN N HAUSER. 


121 


lessness, but carelessness that veiled a refusal to speak fur- 
ther of herself, which was impenetrable. She had every 
grace of womanhood, but beneath these she had a haughty 
and courtly reticence that was impassable. “ Travel has 
one great attraction — it leaves little room for reflection. 
You like it yourself?” 

“ Yes, I like it. A courier’s suits me better than any 
life, except a soldier’s, would have done. However, it 
was not with me a matter of preference ; I was ruined ; I 
was glad of any post.” 

He said it frankly, and with the indifference which his 
decayed fortunes really were to him ; but he saw that she 
was rich, he heard that she was titled, and he would not 
form her friendship under false colors, knowing that his 
own title gave him a semblance of wealth and of station 
he had not. 

She smiled slightly; there were both wonder at his 
honesty, and comprehension of his motives in that smile ; 
the candor and integrity of his nature were very new to 
her, and moved her to a wonder almost kindred to rever- 
ence. 

“You are rich, I think,” she said, a little wearily. 
“You have strength, liberty, manhood, independence, 
honor ; — how many have forfeited or never owned those 
birthrights 1 You chose very wisely to take a wanderer’s 
freedom rather than the slavery of the world.” 

Erceldoune shook himself with a restless gesture, as an 
eagle chained shakes his wings: 

“Icli diene niclit Vasallen!” 
he muttered in his beard. 

She laughed, but her gaze dwelt on him in sympathy 
with the fiery independence of his nature. 

“ Never the vassal of a slave ? Then never be the slave 
of a woman 1” 

He looked at her, and there was something wistful in 
the look; he wondered if she knew her power over him, 
and if she made a jest of it ; he could not answer her with 
that badinage, that gay light homage, that subtle flattery, 
to which she was accustomed ; he felt too earnestly, too 
deeply ; a man of few words, save when keenly moved or 

11 


122 


IDALIA. 


much interested, be could not give himself to the utter- 
ance of those airy nothings, while all his life was stirred 
with passion he could not name. 

At that moment the great Servian hound entered 
through the open window from the terrace, and stood look- 
ing at him with its wolf-crest up, its fine eyes watchful and 
menacing, and a low angry growl challenging him as a 
stranger. It was a magnificent brute, massive in build, 
lithe in limb, pure bred, and nearly as tall as a young deer. 

Erceldoune turned to him and stretched out his hand. 

“Ah, there is my gallant friend. I owe him a debt, 
too.” 

The animal stood a second looking at him, then went 
and laid down like a lion couchant at her feet. 

She laid her hand on his great head — a hand of exceed- 
ing fairness and elegance, with the sapphires and dia- 
monds glittering there, which Mother Veronica had noted, 
with a recluse’s quick appreciation of worldly things. 

“ You must forgive him if he be discourteous ; he has 
so often been my only champion, that he is apt to be a lit- 
tle rash in his chivalry.” 

“ I honor him for his fidelity. But, your only champion ! 
Where was the chivalry of the world, to leave such a post 
to a dog ?” 

“Where! In idle vows and poets’ dreams, I imagine; 
its only home in any time, most likely. The Ritter Tann- 
hauser swore his knightly homage in the Venusberg, but 
ere long he turned on her who gave him his delight : 

4 0 Venus scheme Fraue mein, 

Ikr seyd eine Teufelinne !’ 

The German legend is very typical !” 

“ Tannhauser was a cur !” said Erceldoune, with an elo- 
quent warmth in his voice rather than in his words. “What 
matter what she was — what matter whence she came — she 
was the sovereign of his life; she had given him love, and 
glory, and delight; she was his. It was enough — enough 
to lose a world for, and to hold it well lost !” 

He paused suddenly in the passionate poetic impulse on 
which he spoke, which had broken up in his heart for the 
first time, utterly alien as he believed to his nature, to his 


RITTER TANNHAUSER. 


123 


temperament, to his will. It was of her and of himself that 
he thought, not of the old Teutonic Minnesinger’s legend of 
Tannhauser : and the rich glow of the sunlight, slanting 
across the mosaic pavement, shone in the dark eagle luster 
of his eyes, and lent its warmth to the Murillo-like bronze 
of his cheek. 

She was a woman of the world; that noble truthfulness, 
that gallant faith, that knightly earnestness were new and 
very strange to her. They touched her. 

** If Tannhauser had loved like that — who knows ? — even 
she, the Teufelinne, might have been redeemed. She could 
not have been faithless to such faith,” she said, half mus- 
ingly, rather following out her thoughts than addressing 
him; and in her voice there was a vague pathetic pain. 

Mad words rose to his lips in reply — words that he had 
to hold down in silence; the room seemed dizzy round him, 
the odors of the flowers reeled in his brain as though they 
were narcotics; he watched, like a man half-blinded, her 
hand wander among the scarlet blossoms, and toy with the 
waters of the fountain. It was a delirium ; and, for all its 
feverish pain, he would not have exchanged it to have back 
the happiest and most tranquil hour of his past. He had 
dreamed of her, till he had loved her as utterly as ever a man 
loved a woman ; he was in her presence — at last ! — and all 
love that before might be but a dream became at once with 
giant growth a passion. She did not — with him at least 
— seek her power; but such power was hers in its widest 
magnitude of empire ; and she was a little weary of it, as 
sovereigns are weary of their crowns. 

“ You give fresh air the preference, — will you come into 
my gardens ? They are very wild, but I like them the bet- 
ter for that,” she asked him, as she rose with that half-lan- 
guid grace which bespoke something of oriental blood in 
her, and moved out on to the terrace. 

The gardens were, in truth, untrimmed as the neglect of 
years could make them, but they had been originally palace 
grounds, and all the color and luxuriance of unchecked 
vegetation made them beautiful, with their wilderness of 
myrtle, cactus, and pomegranate, and their stretches of 
untrained roses blooming round the splashing waters of the 
marble and porphyry fountains. 


124 


ID ALIA. 


“ Little has been done here for years, and yet there is a 
loveliness in them not to be had in trimmed and trained 
chateaux gardens/’ she said, as she turned so that the sun 
fell full on her face with its delicate haughty luster, its 
richness and fairness of hue. 

‘‘Yes! there is a loveliness/’ he answered her, as his 
eyes looked down into hers, ‘‘greater than I ever believed 
in before.” 

She laughed a little ; slightly, carelessly. 

“ What enthusiasm ! So great a traveler cannot, surely, 
find anything so new and striking in a wild Turkish gar- 
den ?” she said, half amusedly, half languidly, a trifle ironi- 
cally, purposely misapprehending his words. 

The look came into his eyes that had been there before, 
when she had bade him never to be the slave of a woman ; 
proud, and yet wistful. 

“I do not know that!” he said, almost bitterly; “but I 
know that the gardens may be as fatal as those of Uhland’s 
Linden-tree. You remember how the poem begins?” 

The words took an undue effect on her ; resentment came 
on her, haughty inquiry into her eyes, that she turned full 
on him in some surprise, some anger, and yet more, as «it 
seemed to him, disquiet. Then all these faded, and a pro- 
found sadness followed them. 

“Yes, I remember,” she said, calmly. “Take warning 
by Wolfdieterich, and do not lie under the linden ! Rather, 
to speak more plainly, and less poetically, never come 
where you do not see where your footsteps will lead you. 
You know nothing of me, save my name; leave me without 
knowing more. It will be best, believe me — far best.” 

She paused as she spoke, as they moved down the ave- 
nue, the roses strewing the grass path, and the Bosphorus 
waves flashing through the boughs. The singularity of 
the words struck him less at that moment than the injunc- 
tion they gave him to leave her. Leave her ! — in the very 
moment when his quest had been recompensed; in the 
first hour when, at last in her presence, at last in her home, 
the fugitive glory of his dreams was made real, and he 
had found the woman who had literally been to him the 
angel of life. 

Beneath the sun-bronze of his face she saw the blood 


RITTER TANNHAUSER. 


125 


come and go quickly and painfully ; he paused, too, and 
stood facing her in the cedar aisle, with that gallant and 
dauntless manhood which lent its kingliness to him by 
nature. 

“ Best ? For which of us ?” 

“ For you.” 

“ Then I must refuse to obey.” 

“ Why ? Refuse because it is for yourself that I have 
spoken ?” 

“ Yes. If my presence jeopardized you, I must obey, 
and rid you of it ; if I alone be concerned, I refuse obe- 
dience, because I would give up all I have ever prized on 
earth — save honor — to be near what I have sought so long, 
and sought so vainly.” 

It was all but a declaration of love, to a woman of whom 
he knew nothing, save her beauty and her name. She read 
him as she would have read a book, but she did not show 
her knowledge. 

“ You are very rash,” she said, softly, without a touch 
of irony now. “ I have said truly, I have said wisely, it 
will be best for you that our friendship should not con- 
tinue — should barely commence. If you persist in it, the 
time will, in every likelihood, come when you will condemn 
me, and reproach yourself for it. I speak in all sincerity, 
eveu though I do not give you my reasons. You consider 
. — very generously — that you owe me a debt ; it would be 
best paid by obeying what I say now, and forgetting me, 
as if we had never met.” 

She spoke with the courtly ease of a woman of the 
world, of a woman used to speak and to be obeyed, to 
guide and to be followed; but there was a certain inflec- 
tion of regretful bitterness in her voice, a certain shadow 
of troubled weariness in her eyes, as if she did not send 
him from her without some reluctance. They were strange 
words ; but she had known too many of the multiform 
phases of life to have any feminine fear of singularity or 
of its imputation, and had passed through unfamiliar paths 
with a fearless, careless grace wholly and solely her own. 

His frank eyes met hers, and there was in them a pas- 
sionate pain. 

“ You bid me pay my debt in the only coin I cannot 
11 * 


126 


ID ALIA. 


command. Obey you, I will not. Forget you, I could 
not.” 

She smiled. 

“ Twenty-four hours’ absence soon supplies anyone with 
oblivion !” 

“ It is a year since I saw you in the Sicilian boat, yet I 
have not forgotten. I shall not while I have life.” 

His voice was very low ; he was wounded, but he could 
not be offended or incensed — by her. 

She bent her head with a sweet and gracious gesture of 
amends and of concession. 

“True! Pardon me; I wronged you. Nevertheless, 
indeed rather because, you remember so well — I still say to 
you, Go, and let us remain as strangers !” 

All that was noblest in her spoke in those words : all 
that lingered, best and truest, in her, prompted them. She 
wished, for his peace, that he should leave her, because 
she knew his heart better far than he himself; she wished 
— now, at the least — that he whom she had rescued, should 
be spared from all shadow from her, from all love for her ; 
she wished — now, at least — to save him. From what ? 
From herself. 

Yet it was not without pain on her side also, though 
that pain was concealed, that she spoke. 

He looked at her steadily, the earnest, open, loyal, un- 
artificial nature of the man striving in vain to read the 
motive and the meaning of the woman, and failing, as 
men mostly do. 

His face grew very white under the warm brown left 
there by Asian and Algerian suns. 

“ If you command it, I must obey. My presence shall be 
no forced burden upon you. But you cannot command on 
me forgetfulness, and I could wish you had been merciful 
before , and left me to die where I lay.” 

Unconsidered, spoken from his heart, and the more pro- 
found in pathos for their brief simplicity, the words moved 
her deeply, so deeply, that tears, rarest sign of emotion 
with her, that she had never known for years, rose in her 
eyes as they dwelt on him ; her lips parted, but without 
speech ; she stood silent. 

The day was very still ; sheltered by the cedars from 


RITTER TANNHAUSER. 


127 


the heat, the golden light quivered about them; there was 
no sound but of the cicada among the pomegranate leaves, 
and of the waves breaking up against the marble palace 
stairs; neither ever forgot that single hour when on one 
word the future hung. His eyes watched her longingly ; he 
did not ask who she was, whence she came, for what rea- 
son she thus bade him go from her; he only remembered 
the glory of her loveliness, and the words in which she 
had said, “ Go, and let us remain henceforth as strangers. ” 

“Answer me, Madame,” he said, briefly, “do you, for 
yourself command me to leave you ?” 

“ For myself? No. I cannot command you — it is only 
for your sake ” 

She paused. What was, in truth, in her thoughts it 
would have been impossible to put in clear words before 
him ; she could not tell this man that what she feared for 
him was the love that he would feel for herself ; and what 
she had said sufficed to give back to his heart its restless 
tumult of vague joys, sufficed to make the present hour in 
which he lived full of sweet intoxication. 

“ Then, since not for yourself you command, for myself 
I refuse to obey ; refuse, now and forever — come what will 
— ever to be to you again as a stranger.” 

The tremor was still in his voice, but there were in it, 
too, the thrill of a triumphant gratitude, the reckless re- 
solve of a tropic passion : she knew that the die was cast, 
that to send him from her now would serve but little to 
make her memory forgotten by him. She knew well 
enough that forgetfulness was a treasure for evermore be- 
yond the reach of those who once had loved her. 

“Be it so ! We will have no more words on the mat- 
ter,” she said, carelessly, as she passed onward with a low, 
light laugh ; her temperament was variable, and she did 
not care that he should see that new unwonted weakness 
which had made her eyes grow dim at the chivalry and pa- 
thos of his brief words. “ The fantasies of Uhland have 
made us speak as poetically as themselves. My counsels 
were counsels of wisdom, but since Wolfdieterich will rest 
under the linden, he must accept the hazard ! How calm 
the Bosphorus is, the waves are hardly curled. There is 
my boat at the foot of the stairs ; it is not too warm yet 


128 


ID ALIA. 


for half an hour on the sea if you would like to take the 
cars.” 

A moment ago and she had forbade him any knowledge 
of her, and had sought to dismiss him from her presence ; 
now she spoke to him familiarly and without ceremony, 
with the charm of those first bright sweet hours of com- 
munion when strangers glide into friends ; that hour which 
either, in friendship or in love, is as the bloom to the fruit, 
as the daybreak to the day, indefinable, magical, and 
fleeting. 

The caique rocked on the water, half hidden under the 
hanging boughs of myrtles at the landing-stairs, while the 
sea lay calm as a sun-girded lake, nothing in sight except 
a far-off fleet of olive-wood feluccas. And with one stroke 
of the oars among the fragrant water-weeds, the little 
curled gilded sea-toy floated softly and slowly down the 
still gray waters that glistened like a lake of silver in the 
sun. Erceldoune was in as ecstatic a dream as any opium- 
eater. She had cast away whatever thoughts had weighed 
on her when she had bade him leave her ; a step once 
taken, a decision once given, she was not a woman to va- 
cillate in further doubt or in after-regret, she was at once 
too proud and too nonchalant. She had bidden him, in 
all sincerity, remain a stranger to her ; he had refused to 
obey, and had chosen to linger in her presence. She let 
his will take its coarse, and accepted the present hour. 
The vessel dropped down the Bosphorus in the sunlight, so 
smoothly, that a lazy stroke of the oars now and then suf- 
ficed to guide it along the shore, where the cypress and 
myrtle boughs drooped almost to the water, and the heavy 
odors of jasmine and roses floated to them from the gar- 
dens across the sea. Lying back among her cushions, so 
near him that he could feel the touch of her laces sweep 
across him as the breeze stirred them, and could see the 
breath of the wind steal among the chestnut masses of her 
hair that was drawn back in its own richness from her brow 
and fastened with gold threads scarce brighter than its own 
hue, the fascination of Idalia — a danger that men far 
colder and better on their guard than he, found themselves 
powerless against — gained its empire on him, as the spell 
of the Yenusberg stole on the will and the senses of the 


RITTER TANNHAUSER. 


129 


mailed knight Tannhauser. With a glittering gayety when 
she would ; with a knowledge of the world, varied, it 
seemed, almost beyond any woman’s scope; with the ac- 
quisition of most languages and of their literature, pol- 
ished and profound to scholarship; with a disdainful, 
graceful, ironic wit, delicate, but keenly barbed ; and with 
all these a certain shadow of sadness, half scornful, half 
weary, that it gave to her at times an exquisite gentleness 
and a deeper interest yet, she would have had a fatal and 
resistless seduction, without that patrician grace of air and 
form, and that rarity of personal attractions which made 
her one of those women whom no man looks on without 
homage, few men without passion. With the ease which 
long acquaintance with the world alone gives, she spoke on 
all topics lightly, brilliantly, the languor or the satire of one 
moment, changed the next to the poetry or the earnestness 
which seemed to lie full as much in her nature ; and even 
while she spoke of trifles, she learnt every trait, every 
touch of his life, his character, his fortunes, and his tastes, 
though he never observed or dreamt of it — though he 
never noted in turn that in it all no word escaped her that 
could have told him who she was, whence she came, what 
her past had been, or what her present was. The frank, 
bold, loyal nature of the man loved and trusted, and had 
nothing to conceal. She, of penetration as keen as she 
was in tact most subtle, read his life at will, while her own 
was veiled. 

The caique dropped indolently down the shore, the oars 
scarcely parting the bright waters, the warmth of the day 
tempered by a low west wind, blowing gently from the Le- 
vantine isles, spice-laden with their odor. With the rise 
and fall of the boat, with the perfumes of rose gardens 
borne on the air, with the boundless freedom of cloudless 
skies, and stretching seas, there were blent the murmur of 
her voice, the fragrance of her hair, the glance whose 
beauty had haunted him by night and day, the fascination 
of a loveliness passing that even of his remembrance. It 
seemed to him as if they had been together forever, drifting 
through the glories of an Avillion — as if, until now in all 
his life, he had never lived. He was like a man in enchant- 
ment; the world seemed no longer real to him, but changed 
into a golden and tumultuous dream. 

I 


IDALIA. 


1 tsO 

Time, custom, ceremonies, all grew vague and indifferent; 
it seemed to him as if he had loved this woman for au 
eternity. The passion suddenly woke in him would have 
broken its way into hot unconsidered words, but for that 
light chain lying on his love and binding it to silence which 
only gave it more tenacity and more strength. She would 
not have been what she was to him could he have ap- 
proached her with familiarity ; could he have sought her 
as his mistress, she would have fallen as his ideal. 

No one could have called her cold who looked on the 
brilliance of her beauty, on the light of her smile ; but the 
languor with which she turned aside homage, and let words 
of softer meaning glide off her ear unnoted or unaccepted, 
gave her an impenetrability, a nonchalance, a serenity, that 
were as impassable as coldness. 

“ I may return to-morrow ?” he asked her, when she at 
last had made him turn the caique back, and had tacitly 
dismissed him. 

He spoke briefly, but his voice was very low, and there 
was entreaty in the tone that pleaded far more than a 
honeyed phrase would ever have done with her. Her eyes 
dwelt on him a moment, once more with that profound and 
undefinable look of pity. 

“Yes, since you wish. I shall be happy to see you at 
dinner, if you will do me the honor. Adieu !” 

She bowed, and moved to leave him. Something in his 
look as he answered her made her pause as she swept away, 
and stirred by a sudden impulse (impulse was rare with 
her), she waited an instant and held out her hand. 

He took it; and bending his head, touched it with his 
lips as reverently as a devotee would kiss his cross. She 
laughed a little as she drew it gently away. 

“ We are not in the days of Castilian courtesies I Fare- 
well until to-morrow !” 

And with that graceful negligent movement which gave 
her so languid a charm, she passed away from him into the 
villa; and for Erceldoune the sun died out of the heavens, 
and all its beauty faded off the bright earth about him. 

He spent the remaining hours of the day alone — alone 
till long after nightfall — pushing a boat far out to sea, and 
letting it float at hazard, in the sunset, in the twilight, in 


THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 


131 


*he phosphor-brilliance of the moon, till the chant of the 
Muezzin rang over the waves with the dawn. His exist- 
ence seemed dreamy, unreal, transfigured ; he neither 
heeded how time went nor what he did; but lay leaning 
over the side of his boat gazing all through the night at 
the lighted lattices of her windows, where they glittered 
through the cypress and myrtle woods. He was in the 
first trance of a passion he had scorned. 


CHAPTER X. 

THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 

All the day Erceldoune spent aimlessly ; he took his 
rifle and went over wild tracts of outlying country, he never 
asked or knew where, but he scarcely fired a shot; the 
hours seemed endless till they brought the evening, and he 
walked on and on through sear deserted valleys, and over 
hills thick clothed with the somber cypress, with little ob- 
ject except to throw off the fever in him by exhausting ex- 
ercise and bodily fatigue. The tumultuous happiness and 
the restless disquiet he felt were alike new to him ; he was 
not a man easily to be the fool of his passions, or to let 
loose his judgment in their intoxication; he had held them 
down in almost as stern a curb as any of the iron knights 
of the Calatrava, and now, in solitude, and in the calmness 
of morning, he saw his own peril and his own madness as 
he had not in the enchantment of her presence, or in the 
impassioned fantasies of the night. He loved her; he 
did not disguise it from himself; he was not likely to mis- 
lead either his own mind or others by the veil of a specious 
sophistry, and in the freshness and the abandonment of 
those first hours, there came the chillier memory of the bid- 
ding she had given him, to leave her and remain a stranger 
to her. Fear and doubt were alike alien to him. Yet, in 
calmer reason, he could not but remember that such words 
must have their motive in some cause he could not fathom ; 


132 


ID ALIA. 


that their mere expression had been strange, and argued 
of mystery, if not of evil. She had spoken nothing of her- 
self ; there remained still unexplained, unguessed at, the 
cause she had had for the concealment of her name at 
Monastica,or of her presence at all in those barbaric Mol- 
davian wilds. Who was she ? What was her history ? 
He could not tell. Not even did he know whether she 
were wedded or unwedded ; whether his love could ever 
bring him any chance of happiness through it, or whether 
it were already forbidden and doomed to be its own misery, 
its own curse. He knew nothing. And alone on the hill- 
side, with the vulture wheeling above-head in the noon 
skies, and the cypress thickets stretching downward to the 
precipice beneath his feet, a quick shudder ran through his 
blood. Had he had the mastery of his life so long only to 
yield it up now to break in a woman’s hands ? Had he 
believed in and followed the ideal of his dreams only to 
suffer through her, and be divorced from her at the last ? 

He ground the butt of his rifle down into the loose black 
soil. 

“ It is too late now I” he said, unconsciously, aloud. 
“ She saved my life ; she shall claim it if she will. Come 
what may, I will believe in her.” 

It was a loyal and gallant oath, pledged to the sunburnt 
solitudes and the blue cloudless skies. Was she for whose 
sake it was sworn worthy of it ? 

The world would have told him no, and, being ques- 
tioned why, would have answered in three words : 

She is Idalia.” 

Anything of doubt, of depression, of pain, that had 
mingled with the tumult of his thoughts through the day, 
swept far away when the hour came for him to go to her 
again. One of the Albanian men-servants ushered him 
through the hall and into the magnificent chamber, which, 
once the Oda of an Anderun, served now as the reception- 
room of the villa ; the curtains were drawn back, the blaze 
of light dazzled his sight, and his eyes, eagerly glancing 
through the vastness of the space for the Countess Vassalis, 
met instead the eyes of Victor Vane. 

His first sensation was one of intense disappointment, 
the next of intolerable impatience, the third of reckless 


THE SOVEREIGN OP THE ROUND TABLE. 


133 


hatred. He did not pause to remember how improbable it 
had been to think that she would have invited him alone to 
dine at her table ; how unreasonable it was to suppose that 
a titled woman of so much youth and so much brilliance 
could live in solitude the life of a recluse ; how natural it 
must be that she was acquainted with a man of fashionable 
repute and aristocratic habits, who lived chiefly abroad, and 
knew almost every continental family of note; he remem- 
bered none of these things ; he only realized his disap- 
pointment, he only saw before him the colorless face of the 
guest he had once entertained, and to whom he had felt 
that quick contemptuous dislike which a noted rider, an 
untiring sportsman, a desert-hunter, and a traveler imper- 
vious to fatigue, was certain to conceive for a delicate 
dilettante, an idle flaneur, a ruse silken speculator and 
courtier, such as Yane appeared to him. 

Something in the very attitude of this man, moreover, 
as he leant against a marble console playing with a scarlet 
rose, and humming a Spanish Bolero to himself, suggested 
the familiarity of custom, of intimacy; he looked like one 
in his own home — not less so from the way in which he 
advanced to Erceldoune with a cordial, pleasant smile of 
welcome. His smile was, indeed, always very sweet, and 
of a rarely winning promise. 

“Ah, Sir Fulke — charmed to renew our acquaintance. I 
was delighted to hear from the Countess that she expected 
the pleasure of seeing you this evening. I assure you I 
have never forgotten your most comforting hospftality on 
the moors; my only regret is that we have not come across 
each other before. ” 

“ You do me much honor, and have a long memory for 
a mere trifle.” 

Idalia had announced his acquaintance with her to 
Victor Yane : they had talked of him then ! He could 
not — would not — have spoken her name to friend oi 
stranger. 

“ The Countess tells me that you think you met about 
here one of your Moldavian assassins,” pursued the other, 
not noticing, or not seeming to notice, the coldness with 
which his advances were met. “ I am not surprised — so 
12 


134 


IDALIA. 


many rascals come eastward. I hope you will be able to 
track the fcdow ?” 

“My only regret is, that I did not shoot him down.” 

The answer was brief and stern. He could have shot 
down the man before him. 

“Ah ! great pity you didn’t. Chivalry is wasted on these 
condottieri ; I have seen too much of the scamps in Italy. 
That was a strange affair, that, in the Carpathians ? Mo- 
tive was political, I should suppose ?” 

“Probably. Politics is the hospital for broken scoun- 
drels.” 

Vane laughed softly and merrily. He was a polished 
gentleman and a polished diplomatist, and never betrayed 
it if he were hit. 

“ True enough ! 1 used to busy myself with politics 

once on a Jime ; but, on my soul, I found myself in such 
bad company, that I was glad to throw up the cards, and 
leave the tables. Viola I two of my best friends! Allow 
me the honor of introducing them to one who, before long, 
I hope, will let me claim him to make a trio ! The Count 
Laraxa — Baron Falkenstiern — Sir Fulke Erceldoune.” 

Erceldoune looked at the two men — Hungarian and 
Thessalian. There was nothing of the adventurer or the 
phevalier d'industrie , however, about either of them ; 
they were of courtly breeding and of genuine rank. 

“ Idalia is not here ?”said Laraxa, after the introduction, 
to Victor Vane, who gave him the slightest possible si- 
lencing glance of warning as he answered : 

“ She will be in in a moment, I dare say.” 

Erceldoune crushed his heel into the softness of the car- 
pet with a passionate oath suppressed. What was this 
man to her that he had title to call her by her familiar 
name ? — what the other that he had a right to receive her 
guests, and speak of her actions ? At that moment Dio- 
med threw open the broad double doors. In the flood of 
sunshine still pouring in through the western windows there 
came Idalia. 

She swept toward them with the dignity and grace of a 
woman long accustomed to homage wherever she moved, 
and familiar with it to weariness. She gave the same re- 
ception to all, without a shade of difference that could have 


THE SOVEREIGN OP TIIE ROUND TABLE. 


135 


flattered any, except that, when dinner was announced as 
served, with a slight bend of her head she signed Ereel- 
doune to her, and laid her hand on his arm. She might 
have felt the quick tremor that ran through his frame at 
that signal of her preference, at that light touch of her 
hand : she did see the gladness and gratitude that shone iu 
his eyes as they gazed on her, and a sigh unconsciously es- 
caped her — a sigh not for herself but for him. 

They passed into a large vaulted chamber, the walls of 
white marble, the draperies and couches of scarlet, the 
matting a silken amber tissue, the ceiling in fresco with 
wreaths of grapes and pomegranates raised in gold, and at 
one end a lofty fountain flinging its spray up among flowers. 

“ Who is that?” muttered Laraxa. “ A magnificent 
man, and she seems to favor him. Is he — prey? 11 

“ No. He is a beggared Queen’s Messenger. Besides 
• — don’t you remember the name ? — he was Count Conrad’s 
Border Eagle. Take care what you say before him.” 

Laraxa lifted his eyebrows : 

u Whv, in Heaven’s name, is he here?” 

“Idalia’s caprice 1 You remember, she saved his life; 
but take care — he may overhear.” 

“ But if Conrad ” 

“Conrad is at Athens by now. Chut! 11 

The table was round, so that there was no place of pre- 
cedence except the right hand of the hostess. The dinner 
was of as much sumptuousness and elegance as if it had 
been served iu Paris; and the various Albanian, Negro, 
and Turkish attendants gave the entertainment an Arabian- 
like effect, heightened by the Eastern character of the con- 
fectionery and the Eastern fruits and flowers. The still 
lingering sunset glow was shut out, and the chamber was 
illumined with wax-lights in crystal or in candelabra at every 
point : everything about her spoke of no ordinary wealth, and 
had the air, moreover, of habitual luxury, even of habitual 
extravagance. It might be only surface deep ; but that 
surface, at least, was brilliant. 

“ My table is round, like Arthur’s,” said Idalia, with a 
smile as she sank into her chair. “ There should be no 
precedence at a dinner-table : equality, at least, should exist 
over soups and entrees/” 


136 


ID ALIA. 


“Where the Countess Vassalis is, can there fail to be a 
place of honor ?” 

She laughed softly : 

“You would have me say, like the O’Donoghue, ‘Where 
I am, is the head of the table . 7 That was a truer and 
haughtier pride than would have lain in a struggle for pre- 
cedence. The answer always pleased me.” 

“And yet you are for equality, Madame ?” said Victor 
Vane, with a significance in the tone that did not lie in 
the words. 

A certain contempt came into her eyes and a slight flush 
on her cheeks. 

“ My fancies, at least, remain patrician : a woman is 
never compelled to be consistent,” she said, with a negli- 
gent indifference. 

Yet no physiognomist who had studied the proud curve 
of her beautiful lips, or the firm mould of her delicate chin, 
would have said that inconsistency, or any need to take 
refuge in it, could ever be attributed to the Countess Vas- 
salis, whatever other errors might lie at her score. 

“What can that man be to her ?” thought Erceldoune, 
while the dark color flushed over his brow. Vane had not 
been named as any relative : there was no difference in her 
manner to him from her conduct to others, yet he had about 
him a nameless familiarity, graceful and polished like all 
his actions, which seemed to betoken in him either some 
sway over her or some accepted tie to her. Could he be 
her lover ? — her husband ? The blood grew like ice in Er- 
celdoune’s veins as the thought glanced across him. He 
felt dizzy, blinded, sick at heart, and drank down uncon- 
sciously the great goblet glass of champagne beside him 
that they had filled. The wine that he was used to drink 
like water felt now like so much fire : the fever was in his 
life, not in the liquid. 

The dinner was as choice and seductive a one as that 
with which the fair intriguing Q.ueen of Aragon subdued 
the senses and stole the allegiance of Villena. There was 
a shadow of melancholy still on the hostess ; but the 
dazzling glitter of her wit gained rather than lost by that 
certain disdainful languor — half scorn, half weariness — 
which was more marked in her that evening than when she 


THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 


13T 


had been with Erceldoune alone in the sunny silence of the 
Bosphorus. A woman far less conscious of her power 
than she was conscious of it, would have known that all 
these men loved her, and were, even if unknown to them, 
each other’s rivals. But the knowledge gave her no more 
sort of embarrassment than if they had been guests of her 
own sex. She was well used to all conquest; used to men 
in all their moods and all their passions ; used to intoxi- 
cate them with a smile, to subdue them with a glance. 
She took little wine, touching each variety with her lips ; 
but once or twice she drank a single* draught of hot 
Chartreuse — a fiery liqueur that her sex rarely choose — 
and with it drove away the shadow that seemed on her, 
and abandoned herself to the gay glitter of the hour. 
Watching her, he could have fancied, had not the thought 
been too fantastic, that she had taken the Chartreuse as 
men take hot wines — to shake off thought, and give their 
spirits recklessness. Yet what, he mused, could this wo- 
man, with her splendor, her power, her youth, and her 
fascination, desire that she had not ? What could be the 
canker at the core of that purple and odorous pomegran- 
ate flower of her life ? 

The various courses were served admirably ; and he 
might have been dining at a palace for the lavishness of 
the banquet. There was great brilliance, too, in the con- 
versation ; for in her presence every one strove to shine. 
There was considerable freedom in the topics and in the 
wit, though never actually sufficient to become license ; 
but now and then there were flashes of jest at which 
Erceldoune ground his .teeth; they were a profanation to 
his ideal — a taint on his angel. Unconsciously he had so 
idealized and etherealized her in his thoughts, that a soil 
of earth on her would defame if it were too late to de- 
throne her. “ That is not the tone in which men speak 
before a hostess they reverence,” he said in his soul, with 
fiery bitterness, while he glanced at her to see if she re- 
sented it. She lay back with her beautiful languor, 
’aughing softly, slightly. She was either too familiar with 
it to note it, or if she felt resentment did not display it. 

When only the Turkish and Levantine fruits and crys- 
12 * 


138 


IDALIA. 


taliped confections remained on the table in their silver 
baskets, which dainty statuettes of Odalisque slaves and 
Greek girls held up in a shower of flowers, hookahs were 
brought round by a Nubian to each of the guests. 

“We have permission to smoke in your presence, then, 
Madame?” said Erceldoune, as the porcelain narghile was 
set beside him. 

She looked up in slight surprise, as though the solicita- 
tion were new to her. 

“ Oh, yes l It is as necessary to you after dinner as 
your cup of coffee. Is it not ?” 

“ It is always welcome — since you have the compassion 
to allow it,” he answered her, as he raised the long amber- 
tipped tube. 

She smiled. 

“ Of course — why not ? That Latakia, I believe, is 
good ? All the rest of it, they tell me, was bought up by 
the French Legation.” 

“ It is excellent ; full fragrance, but very soft. Apropos 
of the Chancelleries, at which of them shall I have the 
honor of meeting you most ? As yet, you know, I am in 
ignorance of your nation.” 

He spoke with the natural carelessness of so natural a 
question; the Countess Vassalis, as he deemed, must be 
known by the Representatives of all the great Powers. A 
shadow of impatience came on her face, a defiant hauteur 
in her eyes. 

“You will meet me at none of the Embassies,” she said, 
briefly and coldly. 

And in that moment Erceldoune saw Idalia as he had 
never seen her before ; saw in her a certain grandeur of 
disdainful defiance, a certain outlawed sovereignty as of 
one life against the world. 

“ The Countess Idalia has come to the East for rest,” 
interposed Victor Vane, with his musical, gliding voice. 
“ How is it possible to obtain it if you go en penitence to 
those tedious travesties of little courts, his Excellency’s 
receptions ? Visiting your Ambassador is, I think, one 
of the severest penalties of foreign residence.” 

“Our Representative will consent, I dare say, to release 
you from it if you petition him ; or, most likely, he will 


THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 


139 


not notice your choice de briller par votre absence” said 
Erceldoune, curtly. 

He knew the explanation was a diplomatic lie ; he was 
tortured with bitter impatience to know why the man 
made himself her apologist, or had claim to explain her 
actions ; his thoughts were in a conflict of conjecture as 
to the cause of her exclusion from the" Embassies — for ex- 
clusion fye believed it, by the look that for one instant he 
had seen upon her face. 

The access of vivacity and abandon which a consider- 
able amount of wine drunk, and the introduction of to- 
bacco invariably produce, flowed into the conversation ; its 
gayety grew very gay, and though there was still nothing 
that was licentious, there was a tone in it not customary 
before women of rank ; the anecdotes had a Breda aroma, 
the epigrams had a Jockey Club flavor, the equivoques 
were fitted for a little gilded supper cabinet -in the Maison 
Doree ; such a freedom in any other hour would have 
added to its piquance and its savor to Erceldoune as to 
all other men, but it now lashed him into vehement pain 
and incensement ; it brought the breath of the world — 
and of a very profane world — on the woman of his dreams, 
it desecrated and almost dimmed the beauty of his ideal. 
Out of the mists of death he had once wakened to see her 
face in the haze of the sunlight ; the face of an angel, the 
face of his altar-picture at Monastica : when he sat here 
in the perfume and luster of the Eastern chamber, with the 
odors of wines and flowers, and spices and incense, with 
the glitter of gold and azure, of silver and scarlet, with 
light laughter and light wit on the air, he seemed to have 
lost her again — lost her more cruelly. Even while close 
beside him, the richness of her beauty, the glance of her 
eyes, the touch of her trailing dress, the gleam of the dia- 
monds on her hair, heightened her loveliness and height- 
ened his passion, till the night seemed full of wild tumult 
to him, of fierce delight, and of as fiery a pain, there was 
still on him that deadly nameless sense of some impending 
loss. She was nothing to him, worse than nothing, if she 
were not what he believed her. Alas, where was there 
ever man or woman who reached the spiritualized standard 
of an idealic love ? 


140 


ID ALIA. 


The luster and splendor of the chamber, the artistic 
mingling of color, the rich wines, the dreamy perfumes, the 
scented narcotics, these were all, he knew, the studied aux- 
iliaries of a woman whose science was to beguile. But he 
dashed the accursed suspicion from him as quickly as it 
rose ; he had sworn to believe in her, he would believe in 
her. 

When she at last rose and left the dinner-table, her 
guests rose too, and followed her. A timepiece was strik- 
ing twelve when they entered the salon. 

“ We have been long enough at dinner to satisfy Brill at- 
Savarin 1” said Idalia, glancing at it. “Do you like cards, 
Sir Fulke V ’ 

“I think no man could say honestly he did not, though 
it is the most dangerous of pastimes,” he answered her, 
with a smile. “I have seen its evils in South America, 
where, as in Pizarro’s time, the old proverb still holds good, 
and they ‘game away the sun before it rises.’” 

“ Many do that over other things than play, and before 
they know what their sun is worth !” she said, with that 
profound sadness which now and then checkered her care- 
less brilliance with so dark a shadow. “ We will have 
some baccarat, then. I am fond of play — when it is high 
enough.” 

“ I should not have thought that.” 

She looked at him with a smile ; she knew his reasons 
as well as though he had uttered them ; there was some- 
thing of irony, more of melancholy in the smile. 

44 No ? But it is true all the same. Why should it not 
be ? High play is excitement, and it whirls thought away.” 

“But you should have no thoughts that are pain.” 

“ Those are idle words ! There are few lives without 
pain, there are none without reproach.” 

She turned from him with something of impatience, and 
as her Albanians wheeled the card-table nearer, sank into 
her couch, drawing some cards to her. She looked a wo- 
man to lean over a balcony in a starlit southern night, and 
listen to a poet’s cancion, or a lover’s whisper stealing up 
through the murmurs of the leaves with the reverent wor- 
ship of Petrarca ; not one to need the feverish excitation 
of the gamester’s reckless hazards. Who was she ? what 


TIIE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 


141 


was she? this mystery whom men called Idalia ? he won- 
dered ceaselessly in eager unrest. 

The baccarat commenced. 

She played with the skill of her country, if that country 
were Greece, as her name implied ; played like one accus- 
tomed to control chance by proficiency: but also with that 
alternate listlessness and eagerness which marks those who 
seek it as a distraction from those who crave it out of ava- 
rice. It was its excitement that was grateful to her, the 
rapid changes and chances. When she lost, she lost with 
an absolute indifference, and she staked her gold with a 
lavish extravagance that seemed to disdain speculation. 
Once or twice Erceldoune almost thought that she sought 
to guide the success of the hazard toward himself; if so, 
she succeeded ; he won considerably, to his own displeas- 
ure, and she did not. Over and over again, when the cur- 
rent of chance ran for her, she lost it, either listlessly, with 
that careless scornful weariness peculiar to her, or with a 
recklessness that made her throw large sums away while 
she laughed over a bon-mot. Two hours passed rapidly 
in the whirl of the game, leaving him winner of some 
heavy sums. Her eyes rested on him a moment, on the 
dark soldier-like grandeur of his head, which the rich 
colors and light of the room behind him threw up, as a 
noble Spanish head by Murillo might be thrown up on an 
illuminated background of gold and scarlet ; then, at a 
slight pause in the game, she rose, sweeping her laces about 
her. 

“Play on by yourselves, mes amis, as long as you will. 
I am constant to nothing — the privilege of a woman ! — and 
I shall take a cup of coffee.” 

They all rose, as of course she knew that they would, 
and gathered about her, while two Nubians brought round 
trays of Mocha and bonbons. It had been her caprice that 
Erceldoune should be a gainer by the baccarat, and she 
had secured her point without any semblance of effort. 
The expression used by more than one to her concerning 
him, had impressed her with the idea that his necessities 
for money were far greater than they were. 

Taking their coffee, they stood about her by the marble 
basin of the fountain. As the night grew late, as the wine 


142 


IDA LI A. 


and the incense and her constant presence added heat to 
their mutual rivalry, the bands of courtesy began to loosen, 
the instinctive jealousy that was rife among them began to 
seethe up in covert words and bitter ironies. Erceldoune 
resented their presence, they resented his ; even the bright 
soft harmony always characteristic of Victor Vane began 
to show a gleam of constraint and impatience beneath it. 
Any watcher might have seen that it needed but very 
slight provocation, a very little more license, to remove 
the curb that lay on them, and to let their enmity break 
into feud, mere strangers though they were to one another. 
She saw this, but it excited in her no passing agitation 
even, no thought of difficulty; she was used to see the 
strongest tempests at riot, and to control them, if she cared 
to do so, with a glance or a word ; often she let them de- 
stroy themselves by their own violence. Now, she left 
them, and ran her hands over the keys of the grand piano 
which stood near the fountain, and with hardly a chord of 
prelude sang a rich Romaic ode, a mountain song with the 
old war-fire of Hellas in it. Her voice was of an exquisite 
beauty, highly cultivated and eloquent as any Pasta’s, and 
it rang through the silence, throbbing on the air, and echo- 
ing far out to the night, where it was answered by the 
beating of the waves and the music of the nightingales 
among the roses. Those round her were stilled as by a 
sudden spell. She sang on, scarcely pausing, grand, mourn- 
ful, impassioned chants, now Romaic, now Sicilian, now 
Venetian ; songs of the nations, of the poets, of the hours 
of freedom, of the glories that were gone from Hellas and 
from Rome ; songs of a profound pathos, of an eternal mean- 
ing. Neither Mozart nor Beethoven ever gave richer melo- 
dies than were those poems brought from the past, from 
the peoples, from the heart of dying nations, and from the 
treasures of their perished liberties. 

Erceldoune leant against the white shaft of the marble 
walls, with his head bent ; music always had power over 
him, and it gave her back all the divinity of his dreams, all 
the power of his lost ideal. Never, since the first moment 
when she had stooped to him with that one word “ You l” 
had he seen her look as she looked now; those w T ere the 
eyes that had bent above him with an angel’s pity, when he 


TIIE SOVEREIGN OP THE ROUND TABLE. 


143 


had lain dying in the sunlight. Anything of her empire 
that had been hazarded in the past few hoars she recovered 
tenfold ; anything of abhorrent doubt that had stolen into 
his loyalty and faith to her, were swept away and forgotten. 

He believed in her — he worshiped her ! Not Tess so, 
when with a shock of surprise, and all the Border-blood 
warming in him, he heard her sing the Scottish sonnet, 
beautiful and living still as the waters of the Esk, by which 
it was written : 

Sleep, silence, child, sweet father of soft rest, 

Prince, whose approach peace to all mortals brings, 
Indifferent host to shepherds and to kings, 

Sole comforter of minds that are opprest, 

Lo ! by thy charming rod all breathing things 
Lie slumbering with forgetfulness possest. 

The words, only the sweeter for the lingering softness of 
the foreign accent, came to his ear like the breath of his 
mountain air over the heather ; as they died oil the air he 
leaned eagerly forward : 

“ You know our poems ? You believe that beauty may 
come even out of our rugged glens ?” 

“Surely every one knows Drummond? The gentle 
Cavalier who died of his Master’s death ? You must often 
have seen Ilawthornden, I suppose?” 

“ It was my favorite haunt in my boyhood, though I 
believe I thought more of the birds I shot in the glen, and 
the water-fowls of the Esk, than of Drummond himself at 
that time.” 

“And yet there was Patria in every line of your face 
when you heard his sonnet just now,” she said, with a smile. 

“Ah ! you know that Pope says, 

‘A Scot would fight for “Christ’s Kirk o’ the Green.” ’ 

To hear any of the old ballads is like hearing a trumpet- 
call ; besides — Drummond’s words on your lips ! I can- 
not tell you what they were to me.” 

He paused abruptly, the silence more eloquent than any 
words could have been. 

“You have never heard me speak English,” she said, care- 
lessly. 1 In truth, if you will pardon me, it is the lan- 
guage I like least. Its low Dutch, with all the exotio 


144 


ID ALIA. 


additions that have grown on it, is too hard for my lips ; 
and I have rarely had occasion to use what knowdedge I 
possess of it. Apropos of Scottish poetry, are you de- 
scended from the Rhymer ?” 

“ We believe him to have been of the same race; but 
what is known of him is so enveloped in legend, that it is 
hard to trace. Thomas himself has grown almost mythi- 
cal, though 1 Syr Tristam’ is immortal.” 

“ Yes 1 because Syr Tristam’s folly is repeated by all 
men, through all ages.” 

‘•Folly? It merits a better name; it was, at least, 
fidelity ?” 

“ Felly 1 Fidelity ! They are synonyms for love. Vun 
vaut V autre” 

“ W ould you never, then, believe in passion as enduring 
as Tristam’s ?” 

“ For Ysonde, who is another man’s wife ? Oh, yes ! 
that is a very common feature. The love is so charming 
because it is forbidden !” 

The evening was very still ; the stars shining in myriads 
above the cypress and ilex woods, the heavy odors of roses 
and basilica on the air, and through the boughs of the ce- 
dars silvery gleams and flashes of the phosphorescent water. 
She left her seat, as she spoke, and went out on to the ter- 
race, and leaned a moment over the marble wall. 

“ How cool, how tranquil 1 And we spend such a night 
over hot wines, and idle jests, and feverish play !” 

To his heart, to his lips, rose words in unison with that 
sweetness of the night, born from the intoxication of the 
hour : as though she felt them ere they were uttered, and 
would have them remain unspoken, she leant slightly to- 
ward him. 

“ Go home by yourself — with none of them, if they in- 
vite you. I don’t mean,” she added, with a laugh, “ be- 
cause they will knock you down to steal your winnings ! 
They are not so low as that — yet 1” 

The whisper was low and very rapid ; surprise was the 
dominant feeling that it awoke in him, joined with some- 
thing of a vivid wondering delight — she thought of his 
welfare ! 

“Your wish is my law,” he answered her. “Do with 
my life what you will — it is yours.” 


THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 


145 


“No. Not mine. It is a noble trust; never give it 
rashly. ” 

There was a step beside them. 

“A beautiful night, indeed, ” said Victor Vane. “A 
picture of Gherardo, and a poem of Hafiz 1 Certainly we 
never know what stars are till we come to the East.” 

“ Never,” said Idalia, turning to him; “and now you 
may return to Stamboul by their light. After their po- 
etry come their practical uses. I shall dismiss you all now ; 
I am tired. Good night 1” 

Lightly as the words were spoken, eagerly as they 
longed to dispute the dismissal, unscrupulous, at least, as 
were some of those about her, all were constrained to obey 
her command — all were powerless to remain in her pres- 
ence. Erccldoune was the first to accept her dismissal ; he 
would not offer her even so much insult as would have been 
implied in hesitation, and he took his farewell of her 
instantly and almost in silence. 

Vane followed him with his glance. 

“ Why have you taken to patronize that Border moss- 
trooper, madame ?” he asked, with a slight satirical laugh. 
“He is nothing but a courier, and has only an owl’s roost 
at home that foxes burrow in, and cobwebs keep furnished. 
He is a rough rider and a wild shikari, nothing else; they 
are odd titles to your preference.” 

She looked him steadily in the eyes : 

“ He is a frank and gallant gentleman ; that is, perhaps, 
as strange a one ! It may be odd that I should care to 
see an honest man by way of variety; but — since it is my 
caprice, harm him at your peril.” 

Her guests were gone. 

In solitude she sank down in the depths of a couch, 
with the light still playing on the diamonds in her hair, 
and her eyes watching the fall of the showering spray into 
the basin of the fountain, where scarlet roses swayed into 
the lily- laden waters. She gave a weary, restless sigh as 
she thrust back the bright masses of her hair farther from 
her temples, and, leaning her cheek on her hand, gazed 
absently into the glancing surface. There was something 
of release, something of regret, something of self-reproach 
in her attitude and in her thoughts ; though these were 
K 13 


146 


IDALIA. 


checked by and mingled with a careless ironic triumph, 
and a royal habit of command and of disdain. 

‘'Have I done more wrong?” she said, half aloud, while 
her proud head fell. “Greater wrong than ever! He is 
loyal and lion-hearted — a brave, chivalrous gentleman : he 
should not come among us! The others can play at dia- 
mond cut diamond ; the others are fairly armed, and have 
but their weapons turned against them. But he is of dif- 
ferent mould: he will suffer — he will suffer terribly !” 


CHAPTER XI. 

FAIRY- GOLD. 

In the full noon heat of the next day — heat that brooded 
on the hills and glistened on the sea, in which the leaves 
and the flowers drooped, and the sails of the feluccas hung 
stirless — Idalia moved slowly and thoughtfully up and 
down her reception-room, the sunlight straying in check- 
ered rays through the chinks of the shutters, and falling 
fitfully across her. The wolf-hound followed her step for 
step ; there was not a sound except the falling of the fount- 
ains and the buzzing of a little humming-bird tangled 
among the flowers. There was a certain shadow on her, 
but it was not that of grief — still less was it that of any 
tremulous effeminate sorrow; it was haughty, unrestful, 
with much of doubt, much of rebellion, much of disdain 
in it — the shadow that was on the Reine Blanche in the 
fetters of Fotheringay, on Marie Antoinette in the pres- 
ence of Mirabeau. There was an intense scorn in the 
dark, soft luster of her eyes — the eyes of a Georgian or a 
Greek. She was netted closely in, in a net of partially 
her own past weaving : self-reproach was not the least 
keen of many regrets that were heavy upon her, and the 
world was against her; but she was not vanquished nor 
intimidated. 

She came and paused before an open cabinet, on whose 
writing-stand lay a pile of letters. Her eyes rested on the 
one that lay uppermost, and read its lines for the second 


FAIRY-GOLD. 


147 


time with disdain, revulsion, pity, impatience, and loathing 
all mingled in her glance. 

“ He always wants money ! He would give his soul for 
money ; and yet he throws it away as idly as the winds 1” 
she thought, while her hand absently caressed the great 
head of the hound. “Well 1 he can have it. I will always 
give him that. I would give it him all — down to the very 
diamonds — if he would leave me free, if he would cut away 
every link of the past, if he would go and never let me see 
his face again.” 

Yet still, though there was much of profound dejection 
and heart-sickness at her life upon her, there was no fear 
in it, and no sadness that had not as much disdain. She 
laid both hands on the dog’s broad forehead, and looked 
down into his eyes. 

“Oh, Sulla 1 when one life is chosen, is there no escape 
into another ? If we accept error in blindness once, is there 
no laying it down ? Plutarch has written, ‘When we see 
the dishonor of a thing, then is it time to renounce it.’ But 
what can we do if we cannot — if it stay with us, and will 
not forsake us ? How can Jbe free from it ?” 

But bondage was not submission ; and she was like the 
Palmyran or Icenian queens — made a slave, but all a 
sovereign still. 

A humming-bird flew against her, and, frightened, 
tangled itself among her lace. She put her hand over it 
and caught it, stroked smooth the little ruffled wings, laid 
her lips gently on its bright head, and, opening one of the 
lattices, loosed it and let it fly into the sunny air. 

“ Liberty ! Liberty ! It is worth any sacrifice,” she 
said, half aloud, as she watched the bird’s flight through 
the gardens and outward to the sea. 

At that moment a Nubian slave threw open the broad 
double doors of jasper at the end of the chamber, the hang- 
ings before it were flung aside, and Erceldoune entered her 
presence. 

She had said it would be best that he should remain 
absent ; yet he was not in error when he thought that the 
smile she had given him last night was scarcely so sweet as 
that she gave him now. He seemed half her own by title 
of that death-hour in which she had felt for the faint 
beatings of his heart, and had watched beside him in the 


148 


ID ALIA. 


loneliness of the Carpathians. She could not forget that 
this raau’s strong life would have perished but for her. 

He owed her a debt — the debt of faith, at the least. 
Whatever she might be to others, to him she had been as 
the angel of life. Moreover, there was in Idalia, overlying 
t the proud earnestness that was in her nature, a certain 
nonchalance — a certain languid carelessness — that made 
her look little beyond the present hour, and change her 
temperament as immediate influences prevailed. The tra- 
dition of birth gave her some blood of the Commneni in 
her veins ; and the insouciance of an epicurean, with the 
haughty power of imperial pride, were blent in her as they 
had been in Manuel. Therefore, since he had chosen to 
put aside her first warning, she allowed him now to come 
as he would. 

As for him, life was a paradise — a delirium ; and he gave 
himself up to it. The earth had eternal summer for him, 
and wore an eternal smile. He sat near her in the shaded 
light and sweet incense of the chamber, while they spoke 
of things that served to veil the thoughts burning beneath 
hi§ commonest words ; they strolled through the cedar 
aisles, and through the fields of roses, as the heat of the 
day faded, and the breeze began to stir among the splen- 
dors of the flower- -wilderness ; they passed the sunset hour 
on the sea, watching the day die out in glory, and the fire 
from the west glow over the Marmora waves, and tinge 
the distant snow-crests of Mount Ida and Olympus. 

When the little caique floated slowly homeward down 
the waters, the evening star — the star of Astarte — had 
risen. Through the opened windows of her villa the lights 
of the banqueting-room glittered, and the table stood ready 
served, with the Albanians and Nubians waiting about it. 
She bade him stay, if he would, and he was her only guest. 
Had her wines been opium drugged, they could not have 
brought him dreams more fatally fair — a lulled delight 
more sure to wake in bitterness — than they gave him now 
The charms for every sense, the beauty of the chamber, 
the odors of the flowers, the oriental languor pervading 
the very air — all that he had felt the night before he felt 
tenfold now: then a passionate jealousy, a restless doubt, 
had haunted him ; now he was aloae, and on him only did 
her smile glance, did her eyes fall. 


FAIRY-GOLD. 


149 


There was on her to-night an infinite gentleness, a gra* 
cious sweetness, often tinged with sadness, though often 
bright, brilliant, and illumined with all the grace of talent. 
But at the same time there was the sovereignty which, in 
her solitude, guarded her as an empress is guarded in a 
Court, which made her as secure from words of warmer 
tinge than what she chose to hear, as she was carelessly 
disdainful of the precise customs of the world. He felt 
that she forbade him to approach her with any whisper of 
love ; he knew that to take advantage of his admission to 
her solitude, to give any utterance to the passion in him, 
would be to be banished from it then and forever. He felt 
this though she never spoke, never hinted it; and even 
while the restriction galled and stung him most, he most 
levered her for it, he most honored and adored in her the 
holiness of his ideal. 

There was a difference in her from the evening before ; 
while her gayety was less, the darker shadow was also far 
less upon her. She had scarcely touched the wines, and 
of play she did not speak ; it might be but the “ hope 
which out of its own self creates the thing it longs for,” but 
he could have believed that for the few hours of the present 
she had resigned herself to happiness — happiness in his 
presence. The thought seemed wild to him, baseless and 
vain even to madness ; he told himself that it was a pre- 
sumptuous folly, and he felt that her gentleness to him, her 
smile upon him, were only such feeling as a woman might 
well testify, in mere pity’s sake, to one whom she had found 
in deadly peril, and to whom she had restored life on the 
very brink of the grave. And, indeed, there was a haughty, 
weary, royal grace always in her, which would have made 
a man, far vainer than Erceldoune could ever become, long 
doubt his own power ever to move her heart. 

He asked nothing, heeded nothing, doubted nothing. 
He moved, acted, spoke, almost as mechanically as one in 
the unconsciousness of fever. It was love of which men 
have died before now ; not of broken hearts, as poets say, 
but of its intoxication and its reaction, as in a death- 
draught of opium or digitalis. 

She divined well enough all that was unuttered on his 
lips. She let his love be fostered by all of scene, time, 
13 * 


150 


IDALIA. 


place, and the spells of her own loveliness that a studied 
coquette could have devised, yet she repressed any expres- 
sion of that love as a woman of the world alone can do, 
without any word that was cold, any glance that was re- 
buke, yet proudly, distinctly, and beyond resistance. 

She followed the impulse, the caprice perhaps, of the 
moment, without definite purpose or thought at all. For 
the last eight years men had never approached her save to 
love ; it was a thousand-time told tale to her. If her heart 
had lost its freshness, or its pity, there could be little mar- 
vel in it, even though there were much blame. 

The chant of the Imaum rang up from the shore, deep 
and sonorous, calling on the Faithful to prayer, an hour 
before midnight. She listened dreamily to the echoes that 
seemed to linger among the dark foliage. 

“ I like those national calls to prayer,” she said, as she 
leaned over the parapet, while the fire-flies glittered among 
the mass of leaves as the diamond sprays glistened in her 
hair. “ The Ave Maria, the Vespers, the Imaum’s chant, 
the salutation of the dawn or of the night, the hymn before 
sleep, or before the sun ; — you have none of those in your 
chill islands? You have only weary rituals, and stuccoed 
churches, where the ‘ Pharisees for a pretense make long 
prayers V As if that was not the best — the only — temple 1” 

She glanced upward at the star-studded sky, and on her 
face was that graver and gentler look which had come 
there when she sang. 

“ I have held it so many a time,” he answered her, “ lying 
awake at night among the long grass of the Andes, or 
under the palms of the desert. It was a strange delusion 
to build shrines to the honor of God while there are still 
his own — the forests and the mountains. But do not call 
my country cold ; we are not cold ; there are bold lives 
among us; and we can love — too well for our own peace.” 

His voice had a rich melody in it, and was unsteady over 
the last words ; in his eyes, as they burned in the shadows 
of the night, she saw a passion as intense as ever glowed 
under the suns of Asia, the stronger for the rein in which 
it w^s still held. 

She was silent a moment, then she laughed a little ; very 
softly. 

“ Do not repudiate coldness; it is the most precious gift 


FAIRY-GOLD. 


151 


the fates give, if it be not the most poetic. Remember 
what your namesake of Erceldoune found when the Elf- 
Queen granted him his prayer ; where he thought he held 
an angel he saw a loathsome shadow. The legend covers 
a wise warning. ” 

“Ay ! — but even while the horror of the shadow and the 
treachery were on him he had faith in her ; and his faith was 
justified ; it gave him, in reward, his bright, immortal love.” 

She turned her head and looked at him, gently, pity- 
ingly, almost tenderly. 

“Ah 1 you are too loyal for this world, far too loyal to 
spend your heart on any woman’s love. It is only fairy 
gold, believe me, which, if you took it, would turn ashes 
in your hand. And now, — a safe ride homeward to you, 
and good night.” 

She held her hand out to him with a sweet and gracious 
gesture, the more marked in her because she never gave 
her hand in familiar salutation ; he bent over it, and 
touched it with his lips, a lingering kiss in which all his 
silenced heart spent itself. 

She did not rebuke him ; she had not power to speak 
coldly or chidingly to the man whose life was owed her, 
whose head had rested in his dying hour on her bosom. 
As he rode slowly out down the cedar avenue that passed 
in front of the terrace, he looked up ; she was leaning still 
over the marble parapet, her form distinct against the dark 
masses of myrtle foliage, the brilliance of the moonlight 
shining full upon her from the sea. She gave him a fare- 
well sign of her hand as he bowed to his saddle, such as 
from her palace-prison Queen Ysonde might have given to 
her lover ; and Erceldoune went on through the fragrant 
night, his horse’s feet beating out rich odors from the 
trailing leaves, dizzy with that riot of hope, joy, belief, 
and desire, which is too tumultuous and impatient for hap- 
pinesSj but yet is happy beyond all that the world holds. 
She remained long in her solitude upon the terrace, 
gazing down into the shelving slopes of leaf and blossom, 
where the fire-flies made the woodland as star-studded as 
the skies 

“It is too late now — he would never forget now ,” she 
murmured “ I tried to save him, and he would not be 
saved. ” 


152 


IDALIA. 


Saved from what ? Saved from lier, 

A little while before, and in her own gardens at Naples, 
a brave boy, in the brightness of his youth, bad been run 
through the heart in a rapier duel for her sake ; and she 
had not felt a tithe so much pain as lay on her now, so 
much weary, passionate, and vain regret. Then many 
had called her heartless, and the mother of the dead boy 
had cursed her with pitiless curses ; none would have 
called her heartless now. 

For seven or eight days time came and passed away, 
spent thus. He sought her in the warm amber noons, 
stayed with her amid the wilderness of roses, and drifted 
with her down the sunny sea along the Bosphorus shore, 
and left her only when the midnight stars rose over the 
minarets of the city of Constantine. He met no one in 
her Turkish villa, and she let him come in this familiar 
unbroken intercourse as though it were welcome to her ; 
as though, indeed, their friendship had been the long- 
accustomed growth of years. He asked nothing, heeded 
nothing ; he never paused to recall that there was any defi- 
ance of custom in the intercourse between them, or to 
note that she, with her wealth and her splendor, was as 
utterly alone as though she were a recluse of Mount 
Athos ; he never observed that she kept silence on all that 
could have explained her presence in Moldavia, or given 
him account of the position and the character of her life ; 
he never noticed, he never recollected ; — he was lost in a 
day-dream of such magic that it lulled him to oblivion of 
everything save itself, and all criticism, all reason, all 
doubt, were as impossible in him as insult and outrage to 
her. His own nature was one too boldly free, too accus- 
tomed to the liberty of both action and thought, too little 
tolerant of the ceremonials and conventionalities of the 
world, to be awake to the singularity of her reception of him 
as others might have been. Moreover, while she allowed 
him this unrestrained communion with her, he would have 
been a vainer man far than Erceldoune who could have 
flattered himself that this was done because her heart was 
touched ; or who should fiave brought on him his exile 
forever by warmer entreaties for a softer joy than friend- 
ship. While untrammeled by any of the bonds of con- 
ventionality, while accustomed to a liberty of thought, of 


FAIRY-GOLD. 


153 


speech, of act that brooked no dictator, while distin- 
guished by a careless negligence of custom and of opin- 
ion that was patrician even while it was bohemian, Idalia 
still kept the light but inexorable rein upon his passion, 
which forbade him to pass the bounds that she tacitly pre- 
scribed to him. He was a bold and daring man enough ; 
in his early days he had been steeped in vice, though he 
had learned to loathe it ; he was impassioned in his pur- 
suit of her as any lover that the Asian suns had ever nur- 
tured to their own heat. But he loved her as William 
Craven loved the Winter Queen, as George Douglas the 
White Queen. 

One who should not have cared for her — if such there 
could have been — would have found an infinite variety, an 
endless charm in her companionship. She had traveled 
in most countries, she was familiar with most nations, she 
had knowdedge of the classic and the oriental literatures, 
deep to a scholar’s scope, and warmed with a picturesque 
hue of an imagination naturally luxuriant, though the 
world had joined with it an ironic and contemptuous skep- 
ticism that gave the keenness of wit, side by side with the 
color of a poet, to her thoughts and to her words ; she 
understood men pitilessly, human nature unerringly ; none 
could have palmed off on her a false mask or a glossed 
action ; she had seen and known the world in all its intri- 
cacies ; the variety of her acquirements was scarcely so 
singular as the variety of her experience, and the swift 
change of her mood, now grave to melancholy, now care- 
less to caprice, now thoughtful with a profound and philo- 
sophic insight into the labyrinths of human life, now gay 
with the nonchalant and glittering gayety of bohemian 
levity, gave her much of inconstancy, it is true, but gave 
her infinitely more of charm and enchantment. 

Evening fell once more, closing in the eighth day that 
their intercourse had thus passed on since the night when 
he had found her as he had hunted the Greek to her gar- 
dens ; they had lingered without moving in the banquet- 
ing-room, the wines, and flowers, and fruits still standing 
on the table, no light stronger than the clear vivid moon- 
light shining on the freshly-cut flowers that strewed the 
ground, the frescoes of the pomegranates that wreathed 
the hall, the scarlet hues melting away in the shadow, and 


154 


IDALIA. 


tbe tall, slender column of the fountain flinging its foam 
aloft, ldalia leant back among the cushions, the dazzling 
play of her words ceasing for awhile ; the moon’s rays 
touching the proud arch of her brows, the clusters of her 
hair bound with a narrow gold band of antique workman- 
ship, the voluptuous softness of her lips, and the dark, un- 
fathomable luster of her eyes that met his own, burning 
with the eloquence he felt forbidden to put into words, but 
were not moved by them; they did not droop, as women’s 
often do, beneath the fire in his, they passed on from him 
to rest dreamily on the distance where the domes of Santa 
Sophia rose against the stars, and the lighted minarets 
glittered among the cypress groves of the Moslem city. 

“ It was a fair heritage to lose through a feeble vanity — 
that beautiful Constantinople !” she said musingly. “ The 
East and tbe West! What an empire! More than 
Alexander ever grasped at — what might not have been 
done with it ? Asian faith and Oriental sublimity, with 
Roman power and Gothic force ; if there had been a hand 
strong enough to weld all these together, what a world 
there might have been !” 

“But to have done that would have been to attain the 
Impossible ?” he answered her. “ Oil and flame, old and 
new, living and dying, tradition and skepticism, iconoclast 
and idolator, you cannot unite and harmonize these antag- 
onisms ?” 

She gave a sign of dissent. 

“ The prophet or the hero unites all antagonisms, be- 
cause he binds them all to his own genius. The Byzan- 
tine empire had none such; the nearest was Julian, but he 
believed less in himself than in the gods; the nearest after 
him was Belisarius — the fool of a courtesan ! — and he was 
but a good soldier, he was no teacher, no liberator, no 
leader for the nations. John Yatices came too late. A 
man must be his own convert before he can convert others. 
Zoroaster, Christ, Mohammed, Cromwell, Napoleon, be- 
lieved intensely in their own missions ; hence their influ- 
ence on the peoples. How can we tell what Byzantium 
might have become under one mighty hand ? — it was torn 
in pieces among courtesans, and parasites, and Christian 
fanatics, and Houmousians and Houmoiousians ! I have 


FAIRY-GOLD. 


155 


the blood of the Commneni in me. I think of it with 
shame when I remember what they might have been.” 

“ You come from the Roman Emperors ?” 

“The Roman Emperors!” she repeated. “When the 
name was a travesty, an ignominy, a reproach ! When 
Barbarians thronged the Forum, and the representative of 
Galilee fishermen claimed power in the Capitol I Yes ; I 
descend — they say — from the Commneni ; but I am far 
prouder that, on the other hand, I come from pure Athe- 
nians. I belong to two buried worlds. But the stone 
throne of the Areopagus was greater than the gold one of 
Manuel.” 

“You are the daughter of Emperors ? you are worthy 
an empire.” 

His were the words of no flattery of the hour, but of a 
homage as idolatrous as was ever offered in the fair 
shadows of the Sacred Groves of Antioch to the goddess 
from whom she took her name. And there was a great 
pang at his heart as he spoke them ; he thought of the 
only thing on earth he called his own, those crumbling 
ruins to the far westward, by the Cheviot range, where the 
scarlet creepers hid the jagged rents in the walls, and owls 
roosted where princes once had banqueted. 

“An empire ! I thought so once,” she answered, with a 
low, slight laugh. “ I had dreams — of the scepter of my 
ancestors, of the crown of the Violet City, of Utopias 
here, where east and west meet one another, and nature 
would give us a paradise if men did not make us a hell. 
Dreams — dreams — youth is all a dream, and life too, some 
metaphysicians say. Where shall we wake, I wonder, 
and how — for the better ? It is to be hoped so, if we ever 
wake at all, which is more than doubtful !” 

There was an accent of sadness in the opening words, 
but the rest were spoken with that irony which, while it 
was hever bitter, was more contemptuous than bitterness 
in its half languid levity. lie looked at her with a vague 
and troubled pain — there was so much in the complexity 
of her nature that was veiled from him ; seeing her life 
but dimly, there was so much of splendor, so much of 
melancholy in it, that exiled him from her, and that op- 
pressed him ; the more magnificent her lineage or her for- 
tunes, the farther she was from him. 


156 


1DAUA. 


“You have one empire already,” he said, almost ab- 
ruptly, in the tumult of the suppressed thoughts in him — 
“ a wider one than the Byzantine ! You can do what you 
will with men’s lives. I have nothing, I can lose nothing, 
except the life you gave me back ; but if I had ail the 
kingdoms of the earth I would throw them away for ” 

The eagerness in his voice dropped suddenly, leaving 
the words unfinished ; he crushed them into silence with a 
fierce effort. She glanced at him with that graceful neg- 
ligence with which she silenced all she would not hear. 

“ N o kingdom would be a tithe so peaceful as )our man- 
hood and your honor. Never peril those for any woman ; 
there is not one worth the loss.” 

The flash of a giddy, exultant, incredulous rapture ran 
like lightning through his veins for a moment. She had 
softly repulsed, but she had not rebuked him ; she had 
known at what his words paused, and the smile she had 
given him had a light in it that was almost tenderness. 
He did not ask, he did not think, where his hope began or 
ended ; he did not weigh its meaning, he dared not have 
drawn it to the light, lest close seen it should have faded; 
he only felt — 

“ So my eyes hold her ! What is worth 
The best of heaven, the best of earth?” 

“ There it lies 1” she pursued, dreamily, resting her eyes 
on the distant minarets and roofs of Constantinople, rising 
clear and dark in the luster of the moon, undimmed by 
even a floating cloud. “And all its glories are dead. The 
Porphyry-chamber and the Tyrian dyes, the Pandects and 
the Labarum, the thunder of Chrysostom and the violets 
of child-Protus — they could not make the city live that had 
dared to dethrone Rome ! The hordes of the Forest and 
the Desert avenged the wrongs of the Scipii and the Julii. 
It was but just ?” 

“As the soldiers of Islam avenged the gods of Greece. 
Aphrodite perished that Arians might rage, and the beauti- 
ful mythus was swept away that hell and the devil might 
be believed in instead 1 When the Crescent glittered there, 
it half redressed the wrongs of your Olympus.” 

“And we reign still 1” 

She turned, as she spoke, toward the western waters, 


FAIRY GOLD. 


157 


where the sea-line of the J3gean lay, while in her eyes 
came the look of a royal pride and of a deathless love. 

“ Greece cannot die ! No matter what the land be now, 
Greece — our Greece — must live forever. Her language 
lives ; the children of Europe learn it, even if they halt it 
in imperfect numbers. The greater the scholar the humbler 
he still bends to learn the words of wisdom from her 
schools. The poet comes to her for all his fairest myths, 
his noblest mysteries, his greatest masters. The sculptor 
looks at the broken fragments of her statues, and throws 
aside his calliope in despair before those matchless wrecks. 
From her, soldiers learn how to die, and nations how to 
conquer and to keep their liberties. No deed qf heroism 
is done but, to crown it, it is named parallel to hers. Thev 
write of love, and who forgets the Lesbian ? They dream 
of freedom, and to reach it they remember Salamis. They 
talk of progress, and while they talk, they sigh for all that 
they have lost in Academus. They seek truth, and while 
they seek, wearily long, as little children, to hear the golden 
speech of Socrates, that slave, and fisherman, and sailor, and 
stonemason, and date-seller were all once free to hear in 
her Agora. But for the light that shone from Greece in the 
breaking of the Renaissance, Europe would have perished 
in its Gothic darkness. They call her dead ! — she can never 
die while her life, her soul, her genius breathe fire into the 
new nations, and give their youth all of greatness and of 
grace that they can claim. Greece dead ! She reigns in 
every poem written, in every art pursued, in every beauty 
treasured, in every liberty won, in every godlike life and 
godlike death, in your fresh lands, which, but for her, 
would be barbarian now.” 

Where she stood, with her eyes turned westward to the 
far-off snows of Cithseron and Mount Ida, and the shores 
which the bronze spear of Pallas Athene once guarded 
through the night and day, the dark light in her eyes 
deepened, and the flush of a superb pride was on her brow 
— it seemed Aspasia who lived again, and who remembered 
Pericles. 

He looked on her, with the glow of passion on his face, 
made nobler by the poet’s thoughts that were awakening 
in him. He was silent, for his heart was lulled with the, 

14 


158 


ID ALIA. 


oppression of his love, as the great forests are silenced be** 
fore the storm. 

She had forgotten his presence, standing there in the 
hush of the midnight, with the Byzantine city to the east- 
ward, and to the west the land that had heard Plato — her 
thDughts were far away among the shadows of the past, 
the great past, when the Io Triumphe had been echoed up 
to the dim majesty of the Acropolis, and the roses had 
drooped their fragrant heads on the gracious gold of Al- 
cibiades’ love-locks. 

He knew that he was forgotten, yet his heart did not 
reproach her ; she was far above him in his sight, far as 
the stars that shone now above Athens ; and his love was 
one that would take neglect and anguish silently, without 
swerving once from its loyalty. He would have laid his 
life down to be pressed out in agony, so that it should have 
given her one passing moment of pleasure, as a rose is 
thrown under a woman’s foot to be crushed as she steps, 
that dying it may lend a breath of fragrance to the air she 
breathes. 

“You are born with genius, you are made for sov- 
ereignty, and I have nothing that is worthy to bring you,” 
he said long after, while his voice sank very low. 44 Only 
• — only — remember, if ever you need it, one man’s life will 
be yours to be lost for you.” 

She started slightly where she leaned, with her musing 
eyes resting on the west; she had forgotten his presence, 
and his words, though they told her no more than she knew, 
startled her still with their suddenness. The look of disdain- 
ful pain that he had seen before came on her face — the dis- 
dain was not for him — but the smile that already to him was 
the only sun the world held, lingered on her lips a moment. 

4 ‘ A year’s pain to a true life — a day’s pain, an hour’s ! — 
were far more than mine were worth. The daughter of 
Emperors you called me ? — the daughter of men who 
gamed away their birthright, and played with diadems as 
idiot children play with olive-stones ! Is there much great- 
ness there ? Genius ! — if I have it, I have sold it, shamed 
it, polluted it. As for you — I have had so many die for 
me, I am tired of the shadow of the cypress !” 

Strange though the words were, no vanity of power 
spoke in them, but a fatal truth, a mournful earnestness, 


FAIRY-GOLD. 


159 


tinged by, deepened to, remorse ; the shadow of the cy- 
press seemed to fall across the brilliancy of her face as she 
uttered them. 

“ Then, — will you let me live for you ?” 

The words escaped him before he knew they were ut- 
tered, before he realized all they meant, before he was con- 
scious what he offered and pledged to a stranger who, for 
aught he knew or could tell, might be the head of an illus- 
trious race, the wife of one of the royal chiefs of the Le- 
vant or of the East, or — might be anything that Europe 
held of what was most evil, most fatal, most dangerous in 
her sex. 

She looked at him with along, earnest, unwavering look. 

“It is well for you that I will not take you at your word. 
No I — your life is a noble, gallant thing; treasure its 
liberty, and never risk it in a woman’s hands.” 

The calmness with which she put aside words that had 
been nothing less than a declaration of the love he bore 
her, the serenity with which her gaze had dwelt on him, 
were not those of a woman who did or who would give him 
answering tenderness ; yet the tone, the glance with which 
she had spoken, had not been those of one to whom he was 
wholly indifferent, or to whom his words had been repugnant. 
It seemed as though she would never let him come to her as 
a lover, yet as though she would never let him free himself 
from the sway of her fascination ; she refused his homage 
with easy and delicate grace, but she refused it so that she 
showed that the man who had been saved by her in the depths 
of the Carpathian Pass had her interest and had her pity. 

Noting — and for once having compassion for the deadiy 
pain that she had dealt, she smiled on him ; she talked to him 
of a thousand things with her rich aud graphic eloquence, 
that charmed the ear like the flowing of music, and often 
sank to silence that only lent it rarer charm ; she sang the 
chants of Bach, of Pergolesi, of Mozart; she let him stay 
with her till night had closed over the distant mosques and 
courts of Constantinople, and she bade him good night, 
leaning again over the marble parapet of the terrace, with 
the moonlight full upon her, as she gave him such a sign 
of adieu, just so proud, just so gentle, as Mary Stuart might 
have given to her Warden of the Marches while yet she 
knew his love and would not yield him hers. 


160 


IDAUA. 


CHAPTER XII. 

DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 

Yet — ere many moments passed, — another succeeded 
him ; a head cooler than his felt the charm of the scene 
and the hour, a pulse slower than his beat time fast, under 
the challenge of Idalia’s eyes. 

His rival was alone with her. 

Erceldoune set no store on any single quality he pos- 
sessed ; was ignorant indeed of much of his own value; 
acted greatly not seldom, but never thought so by any haz- 
ard; did straightly, instinctively, and without preface or 
ornament that which seemed to him the need of the hour, 
the due of his manhood; held his course boldly and care- 
lessly among men, caring nothing for their praise, as little 
for their censure; had quick, fiery blood in him that took 
flame rapidly; had, on the other hand, much earnestness, 
much tenacity, much tenderness, more far than he knew; 
had kept through his wandering life a heart singularly un- 
worn, a mind singularly without guile ; was naturally prone 
to good faith in men and incapable of base suspicion, and 
was certain whenever he did love to love to his own de- 
struction, as such natures not seldom do. His rival was his 
reverse in every quality, — cool, wary, impenetrable under 
any airy semblance of nonchalance, vain, with the pardon- 
able if overweening vanity of unusual powers, firmly con- 
scious of themselves, inordinately ambitious, but even that 
in a keen, critical, and studiously sj^stematic manner, the 
Anglo-Venet.ian thought Erceldoune nothing more than a 
fine animal physically, and half a fool mentally, underrating 
what was dissimilar to himself with an error not uncommon 
with minds of his stamp, when their disdainful egotistic 
measurement has not been corrected by the experiences of 
a long life. Yet, widely diverse though they were, and 
utterly contrasted in every iota, the one who never resisted 
his passion, and never thought of her save with such chiv* 


DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 


161 


alrous trust and absolute self-abandonment as were instinct- 
ive to his temperament, was scarcely more a prey to it than 
the other, who with his love, blended a thousand threads 
of policy, design, covetous intrigue, and hated it for having 
stolen on him, hated it for halting on his lips, hated it for 
leveling him with the herd he had so contemptuously de- 
spised; hated it because, for the first time, he had found 
a talent stronger, a logic surer, a perception keener and 
subtler, and a courage more daring and careless than his 
own ; because, in fine, he had found his master, and found 
it in a woman. 

This, a knowledge not easily to be pardoned by one like 
him, made a certain acrid jealousy, a certain smartened 
bitterness, tinge even the passion into which she had sur- 
prised him, when the dark eyes of Idalia glanced over him 
and read thoughts he had fancied unbetrayed by speech or 
sign, or when her careless ironies smote him back with the 
polished, piercing weapons of his own skeptic indifference, 
his own unyielding philosophies, which were as real in her 
as they had been till late in him. 

For many years this woman had been but a name to 
him; only a name, through a succession of hazards, that 
had time after time kept their meeting deferred; but a 
name that had given her a personality to him, and had 
been interwoven with many of the more critical essays and 
enterprises of his career. 

Moving through the gore-stained, artillery-trodden 
maze of Lombardic fields, where in some unrewarded 
skirmish young, eager, patriotic lives had been shot down 
by the troops of Austria, gasping to their latest breath 
“ Italia fara da se 1” he had stood beside some shattered 
wreck of brightest manhood that have fallen there, down 
head-first into the yellowing wheat, and when he had 
thought all life was dead in that broken mass, above 
which the tangled corn-stalks nodded and met in summer 
winds, he had caught a last sigh in which the name of 
Idalia was blent with the name of Italy, and died together 
with it down the Lombard breeze. Traveling once 
through Russian steppes of snow, in the decline of the 
year, when all nature was perishing, and the great bleak 
versts of whitened plain stretched out unbroken to Sibe- 

L J 


162 


ID ALIA. 


rian desolation, he had found a prisoner working in fet- 
ters — a haggard, blear-eyed, scarcely human thing, livid 
with the hue of the lead mines, disfigured with the rav- 
ages of frost-bite, idiotic, with a strange dull stupor, that 
made him utter incessantly, as he toiled in a gang, one 
word alone; and he had known that in this wretched crea- 
ture was the wreck of what once had been the finest, the 
most fiery, the most glittering of all the aristocratic sol- 
diery of Poland ; and that the word he muttered ever as 
he labored was that which had been his ignis fatuus, his 
idol, his ruin — Idalia. In his own Venice he had once 
seen a terrible struggle; it was when a mere lad of Vene- 
tia, a child of seventeen years, with the clear wild noble 
eyes of a young eastern colt, had been brought in among 
others who were “rebels,” and given over to the rods that 
he might tell who his chiefs and hi3 comrades were ; the 
boy was frail of make, and weakened with gunshot wounds, 
and he reeled and fell thrice under the rain of Austrian 
blows, but his teeth clinched on his tongue, and bit it 
through, so that no speech should pass it, and when the 
strokes told at last more mortally than those who lashed 
him knew, he smiled as he murmured, though his mouth 
was full of blood, “ Tell her I died silent !”■ — and he who 
had heard had sent the farewell message to Idalia, at 
whose bidding that silence was kept. Once on the brow 
of a steep hill, looking over the Moravian highlands, with 
the wide wastes of barren grasslands, mingled with jagged 
piles of bare rock or stunted larches, with here and there 
the sharp peaks of a pine-belt to break the outline, and 
the angry luster of a red evening fading out in the hot 
autumn skies, he had seen a Monarch, the center of a little 
knot of Cuirassier officers, draw near, and look hardly and 
eagerly across to the westward, where, far as the eye could 
reach, a dark shadow, like a hovering bird above the stony 
plains, marked the place w r here the Uhlans rode down on 
a fugitive’s wake ; and when reeking and breathless and 
spent, the troopers dragged their weary horses backward 
without the prize they had pursued, he had heard the 
Kaiser mutter in the gloaming of the night, “I would give 
a province for that one woman !” and that woman had 
been Idalia. She had been long thus a name on his ear, 


DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 


163 


and in his schemes, and when at last she had become 
known to him, he had learned to wonder no more at the 
name’s magic. 

To tell her this he had never ventured, really audacious 
as his temper was : circumstances united them closely in 
some things, but with all his tact and all his daring, he 
had never been able to seduce himself into the self-flattery 
of deeming that she would heed his love-words. She 
heard so mauy, the story had no attraction for her ; and 
apart from his own sense of how contemptuously careless 
she was of how men suffered for her, was the reluctance of 
chafing pride to acknowledge that he also paid the life- 
coin of his surrender to one who could tempt like Cal- 
ypso, and remain cold as Casta Diva, while her spells 
worked. 

Yet he could not restrain one mark of the passion — 
jealousy — as he sat that night beside her in the dining- 
hall of the Turkish villa, and stretched himself from his 
pile of cushions to lift from the carpet a white riding 
glove that caught his eye where it lay. 

“A stray waif of our beggared laird’s, is it not, madam ? 
He has been here to-day.” 

“ If you mean Sir Fulke Erceldoune, he only left an 
hour or so ago. I wonder you did not meet him.” 

“No; I saw nothing of him. The Moldavian bullet 
did him good service, since it lias won him so much of 
your interest. He should be vastly indebted to it!” 

She laughed a little. 

“ Surely, a shot in the lungs is not so very pleasant a 
matter that a man need be grateful for it 1” 

“Are there not many who risked shots far more mortal 
than his in the mere hope to win what they never did, but 
he does — your pity?” 

She shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly. 

“ Why should you imagine I pity him ? Have you not 
seen him here ?” 

The emphasis spoke more than volumes could have 
done. Her companion bowed his head. 

“ True ! The real mercy would have been — exclusion ! 
Yet pity him you do, miladi, since you bade me ‘ harm him 
at my peril !’ ” 


164 


IDALIA. 


She looked at him such a curiously fixed regard, that 
had a hundred meanings in it. 

“ Let us make an end of this fencing,” she said, quietly. 
“ There are none here to dupe. We can speak frankly. 
We have done this man quite evil enough without bring- 
ing more upon him.” 

“ We ! I fail to apprehend you ” 

She gave a little gesture of impatience. 

“ Monsieur, you have not known me very long, or you 
would know me too well to attempt those tactics. Eva- 
sion answers nothing with me, and why should we attempt 
it ? Our cause is the same, and we both are equally aware 
that this brave-hearted gentleman was the prey of its viler 
adherents.” 

“ But ” 

“ Pardon me ; I have said we both know it. I have 
grace enough to blush for it : and you ?” 

For the moment a faint flush of shame kindled over his 
face ; he was for the moment silenced, embarrassed, uncer- 
tain how to reply; he had never dreamed that his share 
in the Carpathian attack — which his intelligence had 
directed unseen, though his hand was not active nor his 
complicity divulged in it — had been suspected by her, and 
he was now almost, for the first time in his life, astray in 
the twilight of bewildered doubts of intricate apprehen- 
sions. 

She laughed slightly again. 

“Ah 1 I told you you did not know me; you thought 
you had deceived me 1 Well, never seek that again. A 
man once did : a man of Leghorn ; he was clever and 
vain; he said to himself, l Altro , a woman ! and they obey 
her? I, for one, I will not; I will blind her.’ And he 
thought he was strong enough. He stole away, like the 
fox that he was, and carried his scheme with him — his 
scheme to treat with Austria unknown to us; unknown, 
he thought, to the very walls of the room he slumbered in : 
to the very river reeds he walked by, he thought himself 
so strong. But I learnt it.” 

“And then ?” 

“Then 1 Why then I taught him what such an error 
cost.” 


DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 


165 


“And that cost was V 1 

She smiled a little : and in her eyes gathered a certain 
darkling, retrospective, scornful memory. “What he mer- 
ited. It had been better for him that he had never been 
born.” 

A chill, of something that was almost fear, passed over 
his listener’s cold, keen, courageous nature ; he, too, held 
that which was concealed from her, — if she avenged 
treachery thus ? 

“Vengeance, madame ?” he said, scarcely caring what 
triviality of speech served to screen his thoughts. “ Surely 
nothing so barbarous lingers amid so much worldly wis- 
dom, nothing so ferocious harbors amid so much divine 
witchery ?” 

“ Revengeful ! No. I do not think I am that ; though 
one knows ill one’s own errors. It is easy to forgive ; we 
scorn where we pardon, but we pardon because we scorn.” 

She spoke musingly, with a grave and weary meditation, 
as though memory, and not his words, usurped her : then, 
suddenly, she shook away any darker remembrance that 
dwelt with her, and turned full on him brilliant, penetra- 
ting eyes of half-contemptuous questioning. 

“ Some of you it was who wrought that glorious piece 
of honest work in the Carpathians. You see, they were 
afraid that I should know their scheme : they stole out to 
do it in darkness ; they thought that I should never learn 
it. But it all came to me ; simply enough. I found their 
victim and saved him ; and when Marc Lassla dragged 
himself half dying to my lodge in the mountains, and 
gasped us out a lame history of a bear-play, telling us that 
young Vlistchnow lay dead in the woods from the brute’s 
embrace, the whole was clear enough to me. The dying 
man’s and the dead one’s injuries were both no bear’s 
wounds, but the fruit of pistol bullets ; and though Lassla 
breathed his last in an hour or so, saying no more, I knew 
well enough that they had both been shot down by the 
Scot, and that the planned attack had been done by my 
people ; — by mine 1” 

There was a deadly bitterness in the last words, an 
ominous meaning : such as might have run through Cathe- 
rine of Russia’s speech when she found a vassal faithless. 


1G6 


IDALIA. 


‘‘Your people!” His surprise was admirably feigned, 
but it did not deceive her. 

“Never trouble yourself to assume ignorance !” she said, 
with a certain amusement at his discomfiture. “ You knew 
very well of the plan ” 

“ On my honor ” 

“ Have we any of that quality among us to swear by ?” 

" Nay ! as a gentleman, as a man, I declare to you I 
know nothing of it.” 

She bowed her head ; courteously, as one too highly- 
bred to accuse him ; carelessly, as one too worldly-wise to 
believe him. 

“ Nothing !” he averred, irritably mortified by that un- 
spoken incredulity. “You may believe me, madarae ; from 
my policies, if not my virtues, I am totally opposed to 
every sort of violence ; deem it ill-advised, uncivilized, 
barbaric : invariably give my veto against it. Force is the 
weapon of savages ; learning has done little for us if we 
cannot find a better, a surer, a more secret tool. To pre- 
vent the wild spirits that join us -from following their brute 
instincts, and blundering headlong into unwise action, 
would be impossible. You can do more than most ; but I 
doubt very much if you have not oftentimes roused tigers 
whom even you could not tame when once they had tasted 
of slaughter. The evil of every national movement is that 
the majority, once allowed to move at all, refuse to proceed 
by intellectual means, and loose themselves at once to 
physical violence, in which every good thing is lost, every 
temperate voice drowned. It is this sort of fatal miscon- 
ception from which such criminal essays as that which 
attacked Sir Fulke Erceldoune proceed : it is impossible 
to avoid their appearing alike expedient and pardonable 
to a certain class of characters.” 

The explanation was given with graceful ease, with 
eloquent address : she heard it with courtesy, also with 
incredulity. 

“ Yes ; and that 1 class’ serve as excellent weapons for 
brilliant intelligences which need to use them ; excellent 
scapegoats for such intelligences when they do not care to 
appear in the intrigues they suggest.” 

He felt the thrust, yet he parried it with seeming tran- 
quillity. 


DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 


167 


“ That is but too true, indeed, and the unscrupulousness 
is not, alas ! on the side of the mere mauvais sujets. 
Apropos, madame, you know all things ; who then was the 
leader of the Carpathian episode ?” 

A stern impatience passed for an instant over the splen- 
dor of her face, mingled with something of more wounded 
pain. 

“ You must know too well whom I supposed to be so.” 

The answer was very low ; there was a thrill of passion- 
ate shame in it. 

‘‘Ah 1” There was a whole world of gentle sympathy, of 
profound comprehension in the deep breath he drew. 
“ Was he not then implicated ?” 

She lifted her head and looked at him long and steadily : 
there was more than contemplation in the look. “You 
can better tell that than I.” 

“ No. Indeed you wrong me, madame. May I hear 
what you think yourself now we are on the subject?” 

A scorn that she repressed in utterance flashed with a 
weary darkness in her eyes. 

“1 would have sworn — Yes. He has sworn to me by 
the only name I ever knew him to hold sacred, No. 11 

“ Why doubt him then ?” 

“Why? Ask me rather why even on his oath believe 
him !” 

The impetuous disdain that burned through this retort 
had a terrible scathing satire in it. He looked at her with 
an admiration that was the more vivid because he thought 
her intentionally deceiving him, and thought also the de- 
ception so magnificently wrought out. 

“Ah, ma belle Comtesse,” he murmured, in his liquid 
flowing French, that both habitually used. “ That you 
should have to feel this ; that you should have to give 
such passion of contempt to one so near to you ! It is 
‘Athene to a Satyr.’ How is it that, with such an inspira- 
tion as you beside him, Conrad has never ” 

She interrupted him ; with the ironical cold nonchalance 
of her common tone resumed. 

“ Count Phaulcon is at least your friend, monsieur ; let 
that suffice to dismiss his name. I suspected him ; 1 do 
still suspect him. Did I think that he had been on the 


163 


ID ALIA. 


Turkish shore last night, I should have certainty in him of 
suspicion ; but in saying this to you I say no more than I 
have done, or shall do, to him himself.” 

“And to Monsieur Erceldoune ?” 

“No.” The answer was rapid and peremptory. She 
turned her head to him with something of the goaded im- 
patience of a stag at bay mingling with her careless dig- 
nity. “How can you ask? You have heard him say he 
will kill his assassin if they ever meet. And he would be 
justified.” 

“And his ‘justification’ would free you not a little. Ah, 
where is there any sophism that will curve round to its own 
point so deftly as a woman’s !” thought her companion, 
while he bent forward with a gentle deference in his air, a 
hesitating sympathy in his tone : 

“Count Phaulcon is my very good friend, it is true, 
madame ; and yet I scarcely think I deserved to be re- 
minded of that by a rebuke, because I cannot choose but 
regret that ” 

“Regret nothing at my score, monsieur.” 

“What ! not even that which you yourself regret ?” 

‘ When I tell you that there is such a thing, not before.” 

‘You are very cruel ” 

‘Am I? Well, I have no great liking for sympathy, 
and not much need for it. If one cannot stand alone, one 
deserves, I fancy, to fall. Poets have made an idol and a 
martyr of the sensitive plant ; their use of it is an unwise 
allegory : to shrink at every touch, to droop at every 
stroke, to be at the mercy of every hand, strange or fa- 
miliar — an odd virtue that! It would not commend itself 
to me.” 

“ True. Is sensitiveness much after all except vanity 
quick to be wounded, as the sea-dianthus that dies of a 
finger thrust at it ? Believe me, I meant not to offer the 
insult of pity, scarcely dared to intend the familiarity of 
sympathy ; I merely felt — forgive me if I say it — I have 
long known Conrad, I have but of late known you ; can 
you not guess that the old and the recent friendship alike 
tell me that you, despite all your pride, indeed because of 
all your pride, are bitterly galled, are shamefully compan- 
ioned by a life unworthy you ?” 


DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 


1G9 


He paused ; lie had doubted in how far he might venture 
even thus much, for she was of a nature to which compas- 
sion is unendurable, a thing to be shunned far more than 
pain itself. He knew that already, had lie never known he 
would have seen it in the barely perceptible quiver with 
which she drew away as a high-hearted and fearless hound 
will take its mortal wound, and refuse a sign of suffering. 

“ You say a fact too plain for me to give it denial,” she 
said, chilly ; “but it is also one that I must decline to dis- 
cuss with you. Let us talk of other matters.” 

Even her companion’s long-trained audacity was not 
bold enough to force her on a theme she thus refused. 

“ Forgive me,” he murmured hurriedly, “ it is hard some- 
times not to speak out one’s thoughts.” 

“ I thought the hardship rather lay in being sometimes 
compelled to do so.” 

“ You will jest ! ” 

“ Well, jests are better than tragedies. Life is always 
jostling the two together.” 

“We are like enough to have one tragedy, madarae, if 
that hotheaded courier’s suspicions point the same way as 
yours do,” — he spoke irritably, inconsequently ; for he was 
both checked and incensed. 

“It is not likely they will ever do so.” 

“Why? Suppose — merely suppose your fear aright, 
and that Phaulcon and your new friend ever meet under 
your roof ; what then ?” 

She did not reply for a moment, while a shadow of many 
memories, tinged with something of a smile, passed over her 
features. 

“W"hat then? Why then I should know the truth of 
this matter, which Monsieur mon ami here refuses to tell 
me.” 

He felt the sting ; and he knew that he had better pro- 
voke no more encounters with a woman’s wit. And being 
piqued he wronged her, as pique commonly wrongs those 
who have provoked it ; and thought that she knew far 
more of this thing than even he himself. 

15 


170 


IDALIA. 


CHAPTER XIII. 

“ DIE QUALST MICH ALS TYRANN ; UND ICH ? ICII LIES 
DICH NOCH !” „ 

When he had left her, she leaned awhile over the ter- 
race parapet, with her eyes musingly dropped on the 
shelving mass of myrtle-blossom, and as she stood there 
in her solitude, a step hurriedly crushed the fallen leaves 
of pomegranate flowers ; before she saw him, a man had 
thrown himself before her, pressing his lips on the trailing 
folds of her laces, kneeling there as one kneels who sues 
for life. 

“ Idalia !” 

She started and looked down ; and drawing herself 
from his clasp with the gesture of her habitual haughty 
grace, turned from him without a word, bending her head 
with a silent salutation. 

“ Idalia ! — I have come only to look upon your face.” 

The vibration of intense suffering in his voice made her 
involuntarily pause ; but when she spoke it was with a 
calm indifference, a pointed meaning. 

“Ido not receive this evening, monsieur; did not my 
people inform you so ?” 

A quick shudder shook him ; he it was who had worn 
the badge of the Silver Ivy, and had answered Victor 
Vane with three brief pregnant words — “To my cost!” 
To his cost, his most bitter cost, he had loved her, and he 
had forced his way to her here in the quiet of the night. 
He grasped again the hem of her dress, and held her 
there, looking upward to that fair and fatal face in the ra- 
diance of the full moon shining from the sea. 

She had destroyed him: — but he could not look on her 
without growing drunk with his own idolatry as men grow 
drunk with wine. 

“ Idalia ! have you no pity — no remorse ? You know 


“SERPENTS op night coiled round the summer.” 171 

what you have made me, and you give me no mercy ? Is 
your heart stone ?” 

No change came on her face ; she smiled with a negli- 
gent disdain. 

“ You have studied at the Porte St. Martin ! That is 
not the way we speak anywhere else in Paris.” 

There was a contemptuous languor in the words more 
cruel than the bitterest utterance, in earnest, would have 
been ; with scenes and hours so vivid in his memory, in 
which his love had been lavished at her feet, and sunned 
in her smile, and welcomed by her word, they struck on 
him as passing all that history had ever held of woman’s 
traitorous heartlessness. 

Idalia was now — what much evil done to her had made 
her. 

His hands clinched on her dress in a convulsive 
wretchedness. 

“ Have you no heart, no soul, no conscience ? I laid 
down all I had on earth for you ; I gave you my peace, 
my honor, my abject slavery. And yet ” 

His voice died inarticulate, while the light from the sea 
fell on his upturned face — a face of fair and gallant cast, 
of ancient race, and leonine blood, in the early prime of 
manhood, yet now worn, haggard, drawn, and darkened 
with the hopeless passions that were loosening in him be- 
yond all strength to hold them. 

She looked down on him, still without change of glance 
or feature. It was a tale so often told to her. She drew 
herself from him with her coldest indolence. 

“ You came here to tell me this ? It was scarcely worth 
while. Good evening.” 

Like a deer stung by a shot, he started to his feet, 
standing between her and the shafts of jasper that formed 
the portico into the building ; the endurance that had laid 
him at her mercy, suffering all things for her sake, living 
only in the light of her smile, and knowing no law but her 
desire, broke its bondage now and turned against her in 
fierce but just rebuke, incoherent in its misery. 

“ It is true, then, what they say! You have a heart of 
bronze, a soul of marble ? You have that glory of your 
loveliness only to draw men in your net and hurl them to 


1DALIA. 


m 

perdition ? It is true, then, in worshiping you we worship 
the fairest traitress, the most angelical lie that the world 
ever saw ? Have you ever thought what it is you do ? 
Have you ever asked yourself what price we pay for the 
power you hold ? Have you ever thought that you may 
tempt us, arid betray us, and destroy us once too often, till 
your very slaves may turn against you V 1 

He stood alone with her in the lateness of the night, his 
words incoherent and crushed between his teeth ; and she 
knew that she had done him wrong which before now has 
turned men into fiends, and has made them stamp out into 
its grave the beauty that has beguiled them and betrayed 
them. But she gave no sign of fear ; her dauntless na- 
ture knew fear no more than any Spartan knew it. Her 
conscience alone smote her, a pang of remorse wakened in 
her. She was silent, looking at him in the shadowy moon- 
light ; she knew that she had ruined his life — a high- 
souled, patriotic life, full of bright promise and of fearless 
action — a life laid subject to her, and broken in her hands 
as the child breaks the painted butterfly. 

“God!” he cried, and it was the involuntary cry of a 
great despair that broke his force down before the woman 
by whom he had been fooled and forsaken, yet whom he still 
worshiped but the more the more that he condemned her. 
“ That such beauty should only veil a heart of steel ! If 
you had ever loved — if ever you could love — you could 
not do such treachery to love as this. I know you as you 
are, now — now that it is too late, and yet — and yet ” 

A single sob choked his voice, he threw himself again 
at her feet in the sheer blindness of an utter misery, his 
hands clutching the folds of her dress, his lips pressed in 
kisses on the senseless laces, conscious alone of the woman 
who now had no more thought, or need, or tenderness for 
him than the cold marble that rose above him into the 
starry stillness of the Bosphorus night. 

“And yet there is no crime I would not take on me at 
your word — there is no sin I would not sin for you ! I 
know you as you are — and yet, so utterly in spite of all, I 
love you ! 1 came to-night to see your face once more 

I go to die for Italy. Say one last gentle word to me ; 
we shall never meet again on earth.” 


“ SERPENTS OF NIGHT COILED ROUND THE SUMMER.” 173 

She stood there, above him, in the clear radiance shin- 
ing from the waters ; his words had struck deep to the 
core of the remorse that was slowly awaking in her ; a pro- 
found pity for him, as profound a loathing of herself, 
arose ; all the gentler, purer, nobler nature in her was 
touched, and accused her more poignantly than the most 
bitter of his accusations. She stooped slightly , her proud 
instincts, her habit of power, and her world of levity and 
mockery, made her yield with difficulty, made her pity 
with rarity ; but when she did either, she did them as no 
other woman could. 

She stooped slightly, and her eyes were heavy as they 
rested on him : 

“ I have but one word : Forgive me 1” 

And in that one word Idalia spoke more than could 
have been uttered in the richest eloquence that could have 
confessed her error and his wrong. Yet while she said it, 
she knew that both the sin and the injury were beyond all 
onrdon. 

He looked up, hope against hope flashing in on him one 
moment : it was quenched as soon as born ; her face had 
pain on it, but the light that he had once seen there was 
gone — there was no tenderness for him. 

His head sank again : 

“ Forgive ! 1 would have forgiven you death — I for- 

give you more than death. But if you ever meet again 
one who loves you as I have loved, remember me — and 
spare him.” 

The generous answer died in his throat ; never again, 
he knew, would he look upon the loveliness that had be- 
crayed him ; he knew that he was going to his death, as 
surely as though he sank into the sea-depths glistening 
below, and that when he should lie in the darkness and 
decay of a forgotten soldier’s grave, there would be no 
pang of memory for him in her heart, no thought that gave 
him pity or lament in the life to which his own was sacri- 
ficed. 

He looked yet once again upward to her face, as dying 
men may look their last on what they treasure ; then 
slowly, very slowly, as though each moment were a sepa- 
rate pang, he loosened his hold upon her, and turned and 
15 * 


m 


ID ALIA. 


went through the shadows of the cypress, downward to 
where the waves were drearily breaking on the strand 
below. 

Yfhere he had left her, she stood silent, the moonlight 
falling on the white marble about her, till from the sea the 
luster on her looked bright as day. In one thing alone 
had he wronged her. She knew the weariness of remorse, 
she knew the tenderness of pity. 

Though no sign had escaped her, each word of his accu- 
sation had quivered to her heart ; he did not feel its truth 
more bitterly than she. That upbraiding, poured out in 
the solitude of the night, had stirred her heart with its 
condemnation ; it showed her what it was that she had 
done ; it made her shudder from the fatal gift of her own 
dominion ; how had she used it? 

Again and again, till they had passed by her, no more 
noted than the winds that swept the air about her, the an- 
guish of men’s lives, the fire of their passions had been 
spent upon her, and been wasted for her ; she had won 
love without scruple, embittered it without self-reproach. 
But now, her own heart for once was stirred. 

“ What do I do?” she asked herself. “ Iluin their 
lives, destroy their peace, send them out to their deaths — 
and for what ? A phantofn, a falsehood, an unreality, that 
betrays them as utterly as I ! The life I lead is but cru- 
elty on cruelty, sin on sin. I know its crime, and yet I 
love its sovereignty still. I am vile enough to feel the 
charm of its power, while I have conscience enough to 
abhor its work.” 

The thoughts floated through her mind where she stood, 
looking over to where the sea lay, the dark outline of 
some felucca alone gliding spirit-like across the moonlit 
surface. 

The last words of the man who had left her seemed to 
echo still upon the air; the summons of conscience, the 
reproach of the past, the duty and the demand of the 
present, all were spoken in them. Even as he had uttered 
them, she had thought of one whose fate would be the 
same with this which now upbraided her, and pleaded with 
her. She*knew that he should be spared. It might not 
be too late to save him — to save him from herself. 


“serpents of night coiled round the summer.” 175 

He who had left her to go out and find a soldier's death 
on the blood-soaked plains of Lombardy, stood between 
her and the other life which she had once saved from such 
a grave, and which now was in the first flush of faith that 
held her rather angel than woman, and of love that had 
sprung up, full grown in one short night, like a flower 
under tropical suns. 

Better one pang for him at first than for a while the 
sweetness of a cheated hope, to end in lifelong desolation, 
like that which had to-night risen before her, and arraigned 
her for its ruin. 

“ Most men in their passion love but their own indul- 
gence ; but now and then there are those who love us for 
ourselves ; they should be spared,” she thought, still stand- 
ing, her face turned once more toward the sea. 

They called her unscrupulous, she had been so ; they 
called her heartless, merciless, remorseless, in all her poetic 
beauty, there had been too much truth in the charge; much 
error lay on her life, great ruin at her door ; but of what 
this woman really was her foes knew nothing, and her 
lovers knew as little. With neither was she ever what she 
now was, looking on the white gleam of the surf where it 
broke up on the sands below — now, when she was musing 
how to save again, from herself, him whom she had once 
saved from the grave. 

In the break of the morning Idalia rose ; and thrusting 
back the green lattice of her casement glanced outward at 
the east. The loose silken folds of a Turkish robe floated 
round her, her face was pale with a dark shadow beneath 
the eyes, and her hair lay in long loose masses on her 
shoulders, now and then lifted by the wind. She was 
thinking deeply and painfully, while her eyes followed me- 
chanically the flight of white-winged gulls, as they swept 
in a bright cloud above the water. The reproaches that 
had been uttered to her a few hours before still had their 
sting for her, the truths with which they had been barbed 
still pierced her. 

Proud, fearless, negligent, superbly indifferent to the 
world’s opinion, contemptuous of its censure as she was 
careless of its homage, she still was not steeled against the 
accusation of her own heart and conscience. She was no 


ne 


IDALIA. 


sophist, no coward ; she could look at her own acts and 
condemn them with an unsparing truth ; though haughtily 
disdainful of all censure, she tore down the mask from her 
own errors, and looked at them fully, face to face, as they 
were. Erred she had, gravely, passing on from the slighter 
to the deeper, in that course which is almost inevitable, 
since no single false step ever yet could be taken alone. 

The brightest chivalry, the noblest impulses, the most 
unquestioning self-sacrifice, the most headlong devotion, 
these had all been wakened by her, and lavished on her ; — 
what had she done with them ? Accepted them, to turn 
them to her tools ; excited them, to make them her slaves 
and her creatures; won them and wooed them with sor- 
ceress charm, to weigh them with cold cruelty at their 
worth, and let them drift unpitied to their doom. 

Those who had loved her had been no more to her than 
this ; beguiled for the value they were, betrayed to passion 
that by it they might grow plastic to her purpose, bent to 
her command. She, who had all the superb, satiric, con- 
temptuous disbelief in suffering of a woman of the world, 
still knew that, over and over again, the tide of grief had 
broken up vainly against the disdain of her delicate, piti- 
less irony; knew that over and over again a life made 
desolate, a life driven out to recklessness and desperation, 
a life laid down in the early glory of ambitious manhood, 
had been sacrificed through her, ruined by her, as cruelly, 
as carelessly as a young child destroys the brightness of 
the butterfly, the fragrance of the cowslip, in its sport of 
summer-day chase or spring-day blossom-ball. And for 
what ? For the sake of triumphs that had palled in their 
gaining, for the sake of gains that were valueless now, for 
the sake of a sovereignty that seemed to brand her fore- 
head with its crown, for the sake of evil things that had 
worn a fair mask, of freedom that had grown into slavery, 
of daring that had said, “ Better to reign in hell than serve 
in heaven.” 

She had erred deeply ; all that was noblest, tendercst, 
most generous in her nature — and there was much still, 
despite the accusers that could appeal against her — knew 
it, and did not seek to palliate it to herself. The career 
that closed her in, once entered, as the net closes round 


tl SERPENTS OF NIGHT COILED ROUND THE SUMMER.” 177 

the bird it ensnares, had wearied her, had revoltedT her, had 
made her pride contemn the part she played, her conscience 
plead against the woe she worked, her nature, grand in its 
mould and fearless in its courage, revolt from much that 
she had once voluntarily sought and confessedly loved in 
the earlier years when it was fresh to her. And she was 
not happy : the simplicity of the aged recluse at Monastica 
had pierced to a truth that Paris, and the world, and the 
men who glittered round her and adored her, did not per- 
ceive. She was not happy. With her brilliance, her 
power, her enterprise, the fineness of her intricate intrigues, 
the daring of her constant adventures, the excitement of 
her incessant changes, no morbid sentiment, no passive 
pensiveness could have hold on her or be known to her, 
but something deeper than this was at her heart ; it was 
the melancholy of a mute remorse, the unavailing and 
vainly-silenced lament of one who finds that he has bar- 
tered his gold for stones. 

Her eyes were weary in all their splendor, as they fol- 
lowed the flight of the sea-gulls. She thought of what 
she had been, when only sixteen seasons had warmed the 
luster of her hair, yet had made her Hellenic beauty in its 
early blush and sudden maturity almost, even then, the 
beauty of her present womanhood ; she thought of herself 
as she had stood one evening at sunset leaning down over 
the ivy-mantled ruins of an antique bridge in Greece, look- 
ing across to the JEgean, flashing in the light! an d think- 
ing of the centuries far away in the distance of the past 
when those waves had broken against the prows of Mil- 
tiades’ galleys, and been crowded with the fleets of Sala- 
mis ; she remembered the vivid and decorated eloquence 
that had wooed her then to her present path, murmuring 
such bright words of liberty and triumph, while the waters 
in their melody and the sunset in its splendor seemed filled 
with the grand dead names of Gracchan Rome and of 
Socratic Athens ; she remembered how the proud imagina- 
tion of her dawning life had leapt to those subtle tempt- 
ings as an arrow leaps from the bow into the empyrean, 
and had seen in its ambitious and still childlike dreams 
the sovereignty of Semiramis, the sway of Aspasia, the 
empire of Maria Theresa, waiting in the future for her. 

M 


178 


ID ALIA. 


Eight years had gone by since then, and she had known 
the world deeply, widely, wisely ; she had been sated with 
homage and with victory, she had wakened love almost 
wherever her glance fell ; her hours had been filled with 
vivid color and incessant variety, with luxury and with 
pleasure, with the life of an adventuress in its airy non- 
chalance mingled with all the grace and elegance of patri- 
cian tastes, and habits, and wealth. And yet she was not 
happy; for the fame she had was notoriety, the power she 
had was used unscrupulously, in the core of the rose there 
was always an asp, and in the depth of her heart there 
were disappointment, remorse, and dishonor. 

“And yet I was more sinned against than sinning,” she 
mused. “ I was so young then, and I was allured with 
such glorious beguilement. The regeneration of nations, 
the revolution of empires, the striking off of the serf’s fet- 
ters, the redressing of every unjust balance, the conquest 
of empires and liberties, the people’s homage and the 
monarchs’ crowns — those were what tempted me. It was 
the old fable of Satan and Eve : ‘ Eat of this fruit, and ye 
shall have the knowledge of heaven and earth;’ ‘Believe 
in me, follow me, and you shall have glory beside which 
Paradise is poor, kingdoms beside which Eden is a desert !’ 
And I took the fruit. How could I tell then that it would 
be all a lie ?” 

The thoughts floated through her mind, leaning there 
wearily against the lattice, while the early wind of the 
warm dawn stirred the half-opened scarlet blossoms of the 
japonica twining round it. But she was too integrally 
proud to seek refuge or exculpation in self-excuses even in 
her solitary reverie. 

“Yet that is but half the truth,” she mused, while her 
eyes still unconsciously followed the sweep of the sea-birds 
out to sea. “ I was sinned against then, in the first, but 
it has been my own wrong since. I have kept to error 
long since I have known it to be error. I have loved my 
power even while I despised its means and its ends. I 
have felt the intoxication of hazard till I have let it en- 
tangle me beyond recall. I have known the evil I did, yet 
I have not paused in it when I might. I have seen the 
fatal issue of so much, and I have gone on and on. I 


“serpents of night coiled round the summer.” 179 

have bound them, I have blinded them, I have despoiled 
them, I have taken their strength and their manhood, their 
faith and their courage, their wealth and their genius, and 
ruined them all. I have spared none of them. I have 
betrayed so many. That has not been done in ignorance 
— that has not been palliated with the excuse of youth 
scarce conscious what it does.” 

Her thoughts traveled far over past years, while the sun 
rose higher, and while the man whose existence she had 
given back dreamed of her with the waking of the day, as 
of one so far above his love, that 

“No head save some world-genius should rest 
Above the trearsures of that perfect breast.” 

She remained still and silent at the casement till the dis- 
tant call of the drums, as the Soldan went up to the 
mosque for the sunrise prayers, died softly away on the 
air. 

“ I will save him at least. One sharp blow — and per- 
haps he will forget. Pride will aid him ; and if we never 
meet again, I shall remain only a dream to him — a dream 
without pain,” she said, half aloud. And, for the moment, 
a darker shadow swept over her face ; she remembered 
loyal eyes that had gazed their eager passion into hers ; 
she remembered leonine strength that would have been 
felled into its tomb but for her ; she remembered that the 
man who had sought her with such untiring patience on 
the clew of one frail memory, would not forget in a day, in 
a year. But her resolve was not shaken. 

“ I will save him if he will be saved ; — he, at least, shall 
have nothing to reproach me,” she thought, while she 
watched the gray sea flash between the scarlet blossoms of 
the japonica tendrils. Then she turned away from the 
window, and rang a hand-bell that had once belonged to 
Catherina Medici : like the one whose long, slender palm 
had before touched the spiral column of its handle, she 
never hesitated in any course when her resolve was taken, 
she never swerved when once she had decided. 

The Nubian slave, who attended her wherever she trav- 
eled as her maid, answered the summons from where she 
stood in the ante-chamber. 


180 


IDALIA. 


“ Tell Paulas that I start for Naples this morning. He 
knows what to do. I leave by ten.” 

The Nubian bowed to the ground, and withdrew. Her 
mistress stood beside the table where the bell was placed, 
thoughtful still, with the shadow that had gathered on her 
deepening in the purple light that fell through violet cur- 
tains near. She was not a woman to whom regret was 
familiar; — many would have said she was too heartless: 
it was rather because she had seen, and known, and pene- 
trated too much to be lightly touched; — but a great tear- 
less pain gathered in her eyes, and her hand closed with a 
gesture of impatience on the sharp metal circle of the bell. 

“ He will be stung to the heart — and yet, better one 
pang at once !” she said in her solitude. “ What could it 
avail him to know me more except to suffer longer ?” 

Her resolve was not changed ; vacillation was impossi- 
ble to her; she had none of its weakness in her nature, 
but a regret poignant and almost remorseful was on her. 
She thought of the fearless fidelity with which he had re- 
fused ever again to become as a stranger to her, she 
thought of the fealty that she knew so well he bore to her, 
that had looked out from the ardent worship of his eyes 
in the calm of the eastern night a few short hours before. 

And she was about to kill this at a blow, because the 
prayer of another had pierced her heart and pleaded with 
her to spare him, — if it were not too late. 

A new life had dawned on Erceldoune. 

All his old habits of soldier-like decision, of sportsman- 
like activity, w T ere broken up ; he who had used to find 
his greatest pleasures in the saddle and the rifle, in wait- 
ing high up in a leafy nest for the lions to come down to 
the spring to drink, and in riding wild races with Arabs 
over amber stretches of torrid sand, in spending whole 
days alone among the sedge-pools of the Border fowl, and 
in bivouacking through a scorching night with Brazilian 
guanchos, had now changed into the veriest dreamer that 
ever let the long hours steal away, 

“floating up, bright forms ideal, 

Half sense-supplied, and half unreal. 

Like music mingling with a dream.” 


“UND ICII? ICH LIEB DICH NOCH.” 181 

He lived in a land of enchantment, whose sole sunlight 
was a woman’s glance; he gave himself up without a 
struggle to the only passion that had ever touched his life. 
Now and then forebodings swept over him ; now and then 
his own utter ignorance of the woman to whom he was 
yielding up his destiny, smote him with a terrible pang, 
but very rarely : in proportion to the length of his resist- 
ance to such a subjugation, was the reckless, headlong 
force of his fall into its power. Moreover, his nature was 
essentially unsuspecting ; and he had an old-world chiv- 
alry in him that would have made it seem to him the poor- 
est poltroonery to cast doubt on the guardian-angel who 
had saved him from the very jaws of death. His mother, 
lost in his earliest childhood, had been of Spanish race ; 
neglected by her lord, she had been left to break her spirit 
as she would against the gray walls of the King’s Rest, 
longing for the perfume and the color and the? southern 
winds of her home in the Yega, while the Border moors 
stretched round her, and the Cheviots shut her in until 
she died, like a tropic bird, caged in cold and in twilight. 
A softness, inherited from the tenderness and the enthu- 
siasm of her southern blood, was latent in her son, little 
as he knew it ; an unworldliness and trustfulness were in 
his nature, though he did not perceive them ; and though 
his career had done much to strengthen the lion-like 
daring and athlete’s hardihood of his character, on the 
other hand the picturesque coloring and varied wander- 
ing in which his years had been spent had done much to 
preserve the vein of romance within him, unworn while 
unsuspected. Nothing had touched this side of his nature 
until now; and now, the stronger for its past suppression, 
it conquered him in its turn, and ruled alone. 

When he left her that evening he could not sleep ; he 
rode far and fast through the late night, dashing down into 
the interior, along sandy plains, and through cypress 
groves, across stretches of tangled vegetation, and over 
the rocky beds of dried-up brooks, or the foam of tum- 
bling freshets. The swift rush through the cooled air 
soothed the fever in him ; his thoughts and his passions 
kept throbbing time with the beat of the hoofs, with the 
sweep of the gallop. He loved her, he thought ; — oh 1 
God, how he loved her 1 


16 


182 


ID ALIA. 


So long ago loved his namesake the Rhymer, when 
under the tree of Erceldoune — the Tree of Grammarye — - 
the sorceress lips touched his, and the eyes brighter than 
mortal brightness looked into his own ; lips that wooed 
him across the dark Border, eyes that dared him to brave 
the Lake of Fire for her sake. Those old, old legends ! 
— how they repeat themselves in every age, in every life. 

With the dawn he came upon a pool, lying land-locked, 
far and solitary, encircled with cedars and cypress and 
superb drooping boughs, now heavy with the white blos- 
soms of the sweet chestnut, and while his horse drank at 
the brink, he threw himself in to bathe, dipping down into 
the clear brown waters, and striking out into the depths of 
green blossoming shade, while the swell of a torrent that 
poured into it lashed him with its foam, cold even in the 
east before sunrise, and hurled the mass of water against 
his limbs, firm-knit, sinewy, colossal as the polished limbs 
of a Roman bronze of Milo. As he shook the drenching 
spray from his hair, and swam against the current, looking 
upward at the sky where the dawn was just breaking, all 
the beauty that life might know seemed suddenly to rise 
on him in revelation. There is an eastern fable that tells 
liow, when Paradise faded from earth, a single rose was 
saved and treasured by an angel, who gives to every mor- 
tal, sooner or later in his life, one breath of fragrance from 
the immortal flowers — oue alone. The legend came to his 
memory as the sunbeams deepened slanting spear-like across 
the azure of the skies, and he dashed down into the shock 
of the waters to still in him this fierce sweetness of long- 
ing for all that would never be his own. 

One woman alone could bring to him that perfume of 
Paradise; the rose of Eden could only breathe its divine 
fragrance on him from her lips. And he would have given 
all the years of his life to have it come to him one hour. 

When the day was at noon he went to her, heeding no 
more the downpour of the scorching vertical rays than the 
Rhymer had heeded the leaping tongues of flame while he 
rode, with the golden tresses sweeping his lips, down to 
the glories of Fcerie Distinct thought, distinct expectance, 
he had none ; he had but one instinct, to see her, to be 
with her, to lay down at her feet the knightliest service 


* ( UND ICII? ICII LIEB DICII NOCH.” 183 

that ever man gave to woman. He knew nothing of her, 
knew not whether she were wedded or unwedded, but he 
knew that the world had one meaning alone for him now 
— he loved her. That she could ever answer it, he had 
barely the shadow of a hope: there was much humility in 
him; he held himself but at a lowly account; though a 
proud man with men, he would have felt, had he ever fol- 
lowed out, his thoughts, that he had nothing with which 
to merit or to win the haughty and brilliant loveliness of 
Idalia; he would have felt that he had no title, and no 
charm, to gain her and gather her into arms that would be 
strong, indeed, to defend her until the last breath of life, 
as they had been strong to strangle the bear in the death 
grasp and to tame the young wild horse on the prairies, 
but that had no gold to clasp and fling down at her feet, 
no purples of state and of wealth to fold round her, bring- 
ing their equal royalty to hers. That he himself could 
attract her, he would have had little belief ; he did not see 
himself as others saw him ; he did not know that his vigor- 
ous magnificence of form, his dauntless manhood, his gen- 
erous unselfishness, his untrammeled freedom of thought 
and deed, might charm a woman who had been tired by 
all, won by none ; he was unconscious of any of these in 
his own person, and he would have thought that he had 
nothing on earth which could give him the right ever to 
hope for her tenderness. But hope is always strong in us 
till despair is forced on us. however little we may know 
that hope’s existence; and thought was the last thing that 
was shaped in him — thought never grouped itself before 
him; he was still in the opium-dream; neither future nor 
past existed for him; he was drunk with his present; his 
love blinded him to any other memory than itself. It was 
too wholly in its early freshness for it to forecast its fate. 

His eyes eagerly swept over the building as he rode up 
the avenue; the lattices were all closed ; this was usual in 
the noon, yet it gave him a vague disquietude and dread. 
The echo of his step resounded on the marble, as it had 
done when he had forced his entrance into what he had 
believed the lair of his assassin : it was the only sound, 
and the stillness froze his heart like ice : the rolling bay 


184 


ID ALIA. 


of the hound had never before failed to challenge his ar- 
rival. 

The first court was deserted ; in the second he saw the 
Abyssinian. 

“ The Countess Yassalis ?” he asked, rapidly. 

“ Is not here,” answered the negress. 

“ Not here 1” 

“No, most illustrious. Her Excellency left Stamboul 
this morning.” 

He staggered like a man who has received a blow. 

“ Left — where ? — why ? — for how long ?” 

The Abyssinian shook her head with a profound salaam ; 
she knew nothing, or would say nothing ; her mistress had 
left Constantinople ; where she intended to travel she could 
not tell ; her Excellency was always traveling, she believed ; 
but a note had been given her to deliver to the English 
Effendi, perhaps that might tell more. 

He seized it from her as she drew it from the yellow folds 
of her sash, and tore it open ; a mist was before his sight, 
and his wrist shook while he held the paper as it had never 
done lifting the rifle to his shoulder, when one error in the 
bullet’s flight would have been instant death to himself. 
The letter brought him little solace ; it was but a few words 
of graceful courtesy, giving him the adieu that a sudden 
departure rendered necessary, but adding nothing of why 
or whither she was gone, and seeming, in their polished 
ceremonial, cold as ice to the storm of shattered hope and 
tempestuous pain that was rife in his own heart. Instinct- 
ively as his hand dosed on it he turned away from the 
Abyssinian, and went out of the court into the hot blaze 
of day, alone ; he could not bear the eyes of even that 
African upon him in the desolation that had swept down 
upon his life. He went out ; where, he did not see or 
know, passing into the scorching air and into the cooler 
shade of the groves, with a blind, dumb suffering on him 
like the suffering of a dog. For her he had no pride, 
against wounds from her hand he had no shield ; and 
nothing with which she could wring his heart, nothing with 
which she could try his loyalty, could avail to turn his love 
away. They had been no idle words with which he had 
said that his life was hers to do with what she would; hav 


“UND ICH? ICH LIEB DICII NOCH.” 185 

ing made the vow he would keep it, no matter what the 
test, or what the cost. 

He crushed in his grasp that pitiless letter ; — her hand 
had touched it, her hand had written it, bitter as it was it 
was sacred to him ; and he stood in the vertical sun, gazing 
blankly down on the waves below the terraces, tossing up- 
ward in the light at his feet. The blow had fallen on him 
with a crushing, sickening force, — again he had lost her 1 
Again, when to the old baffled weariness with which he had 
so long vainly sought her was added the certainty that he 
who had lavished his heart’s best treasure on her was no 
more to her than the yellow sands that the seas kissed and 
left. 

A few hours before and her eyes had smiled on him, her 
presence had been with him ; she had listened to him, 
spoken with him, let him linger beside her in all the fa- 
miliar communion of a welcome friendship; he could not 
realize that he was forsaken by her without a word, with- 
out a regret, without an effort for them ever to meet again. 
He had no claim on her remembrance, no title to her con- 
fidence, it was true ; his acquaintance with her was slight, 
as the world would have considered. But he could not 
realize that the tie between them of a life saved, so power- 
ful on him, so deathless in its memory for him, could be as 
nothing to her. The wanton cruelty of her desertion seemed 
to him so merciless that he had no remembrance of how 
little hold he had, in reason and in fact, upon her tender- 
ness. The knowledge of her loss alone was on him, leav- 
ing him no consciousness save of the burning misery that 
possessed him. 

As he had never loved, so he had never suffered until 
now; his adventurous career in camps, and cities, and 
deserts, had never been touched by any grief ; he had come 
there in the gladness of the morning, full of faith, of hope, 
of eager delight, and of unquestioning expectation, and 
he stood in the scorch of the noonday heat, stupefied, the 
glare of sun and sea unfelt in the fiery agony that had 
seized him. 

The little gilded caique was rocking at his feet, where 
it was moored to the landing-stairs ; trifles link thought 
to thought, and with the memory of that first enchanted 

16 * 


186 


IDALIA. 


hour when he had floated with her down the water, he re- 
membered the warning that she had given him — the warn- 
ing “not to lie under the linden. ” 

The warning had been — she had said — for his sake, not 
her own ; was it for his that she had left him now ? She 
had implied that some 1 sort of peril, some threatening of 
danger, must await him with her friendship ; was it to 
save him from these that she had left him thus ? Then the 
humility that was as integrally a part of his nature, as his 
lofty pride of race was toward men, subdued the bitter 
sense of her cruelty : what was he more to her than any 
other to whom she gave her gracious courtesies that he 
should look for recollection from her ? He owed her his 
life ; — but that debt lay on him, it left no claim to her. 
What was there in him that he could hope in their brief 
intercourse to have become any dearer to her than any 
other chance-met acquaintance of the hour ? He could not 
upbraid her with having smiled on him one hour to for- 
sake him as a stranger the next, for with the outset she 
had bade him leave her unknown. 

Hot tears, the first that had ever come there since as a 
child he had sobbed over his young mother’s grave, rushed 
into his eves, shutting out the stretch of the sparkling seas 
and the rich coloring around him, where Cashmere roses 
and Turkish lilies bloomed in untrained luxuriance. The 
sea had no freedom, the flowers no fragrance, the green 
earth in its early summer no beauty for him ; — he only felt 
that let him spend loyalty, fidelity, life and peace upon her 
as he would, he might never be one shadow nearer to her 
than he was now, he might never touch her to one breath 
of tenderness, never move her to one pang of pity. Ilis 
strength was great, he had wrestled with the gaunt north- 
ern bear in the cold of a Scandinavian night, he had fought 
with ocean and storm in the madness of a tropical tempest, 
he had closed with the African lion in a fierce embrace, and 
wrenched the huge jaws apart as they closed on their prey ; 
he had prevailed in these things by fearless force, by hu- 
man might: but now, in his weakness and his misery, he 
could have flung himself down on the tawny sands and 
wept like a woman for the hopes that were scattered, for 
the glory that was dead. 


“UND 1CH ? ICH LIEB DICH N0CH.” 


187 


Another moment, and he had crossed the labyrinth of 
the garden, thrown himself into saddle, and turned back 
toward the city. The Greeks idly lying under the shelter 
of their fishing or olive feluccas drawn up on the shore, 
and the Turks sitting on their cocoa-nut mats under the 
shadow of fig-tree or vine at the entrance of their huts, 
stared aghast at the breathless horse, thundering along the 
sea-road through the noontide heat, his flanks covered with 
foam, and the white burnous of his Giaour rider floating 
out upon the wind. Down the steep pathways, over the 
jagged rocks, across the flat burning levels of sand, and 
under the leaning grape-covered walls, Erceldoune rode, 
reckless of danger, unconscious of the fierce sun- fire pour- 
ing on his head. 

He had sworn to follow her, whether her route were 
seaward to Europe, or eastward into the wild heart of 
Asia. Pride, reason, wounded feeling, wavering faith, none 
of them availed to turn him from his course. He was true 
to his oath ; and the madness was upon him that in the 
golden verse of his namesake the Rhymer makes Syr Tris- 
tam love better to go back to the risk of death and shame, 
to the land of his foe, to the old piercing pain and the old 
delicious sorcery, than to live in peace and honor and roy- 
alty without the smile of King Marc’s wife, without the 
light of Ysonde’s eyes. Let come what would, he followed 
Idalia. 

In the feeling he bore her there was a strange mingling 
of utter humility, of most reverential chivalry, with the 
wildest passion and the most reckless daring ; in it the 
two sides of his nature were blent. 

He rode to the Golden Horn, where the flags of every 
nation were streaming from the crowded masts in the 
clear hot light. He knew that her departure by any one 
of the vessels could easily be ascertained. 

To seek the guests whom he had met at her house ; to 
inquire of her from the numerous acquaintance he had 
among the various chancelleries in Constantinople, and 
the military and naval men passing through or staying off 
there ; to ask who she was, whence she came, how she was 
held in social estimation ; all that might have been the 
natural course of most was impossible to Erceldoune. 


183 


ID ALIA. 


He could not have brought himself to speak of her to 
others ; he felt that if he heard her name lightly uttered, 
he should strike his hand on the mouth that uttered it ; 
and intense as his longing might be to pierce the mystery 
that apparently shrouded her, the quixotic code of his 
love and his honor would have let him ask nothing 
through strangers that she withheld herself. He prose- 
cuted his search alone, and the rapidity in such investiga- 
tions gained by habit soon brought him the knowledge he 
pursued. 

Before evening he had learned among the sailors in the 
port that a steam yacht belonging to her, the Io, which 
had returned twenty-four hours previously from Athens, 
had taken its departure early in the morning ; for Capri, 
the Greek crew had said, with no one on board but her- 
self, her suite, and the Silesian dog. The yacht was prob- 
ably by now through the Dardanelles. It was well known 
in the Golden Horn, the sailors told him, that she usually 
came from Europe in it ; it could be recognized anywhere 
on the seas, for it always carried the green white and scar- 
let of the Italian national colors, crossed on the Greek en- 
sign — a fancy, it was supposed, of her Excellency’s. 

Erceldoune’s eyes strained across the glittering expanse 
of water with a wistful longing as he listened ; every word 
he gathered plunged like a knife into his heart; — no 
steamer went from the harbor that day to Naples ; with 
twelve or twice twelve hours between them, how could he 
tell but what again she might be lost to him, how or 
where or when he might ever recover the clew she had 
rent asunder ? 

“If that schooner were only mine!” he muttered un- 
consciously aloud, as his glance fell on a yacht in the har- 
bor, with her gold figure-head and her brass swivel guns 
glistening in the sun ; — his want of wealth he had never 
felt, his nature was too high-toned, his habits too hardy, 
Ids temper too bold ; but now for the first time the pang 
of his beggared fortunes struck heavily on him. Were 
wealth his own, how soon the seas that severed them 
might be bridged 1 

A familiar hand was struck on his shoulder as he stood 
looking across at the gray arc of the Bosphorus, straining 


“UND ICII? ICII LIEB Dicn NOCII.” 189 

his eyes into the offing as though he could pierce the dis- 
tance and follow her with his gaze. 

“You want a yacht? Take Etoile. I am going in- 
land on a special mission into Arabia ; bring her back in 
a year’s time ; that will be soon enough for me.” 

Erceldoune turned and saw a man fie knew well ; a true 
and tried friend ; one with whom he had gone on many a 
perilous expedition ; a dauntless traveler, a pure Arabic 
scholar, and a skilled negotiator with Eastern chiefs and 
tribes. 

The Etoile was at his service, with her captain and her 
crew, to take him where he would ; there remained but 
the duties of the Messenger Service to detain him, and 
these, on application, let him loose. He had so habitually 
abstained throughout the twenty years of his service from 
any effort to shirk or shift the most dangerous or most irk- 
some missions, that as nothing specially required him then, 
and a courier was daily expected from Russia who could 
take dispatches home in his place, he easily obtained his 
furlough, and by sunset he weighed anchor. 

The yacht steered out of the varied fleet of merchant- 
men that crowded the Golden Horn, steered out to the 
open sea, while the scarlet glory of the after-glow lingered 
in the skies, and dyed the waters blood-red in its light. 
To what fate did he go ? he asked himself. 

Safer, wiser, better far, he thought, that he should turn 
back with his familiar comrade, and plunge down into the 
core of Asia, into the old athletic, bracing open-air life, 
into the pleasures that had never palled of forest and rifle, 
of lake and mountain, of the clear ringing shot and the 
wild day- dawn gallop, into the pastimes that had no taint 
in them, the chase that had no pang in it. That old life 
had been so free, so elastic, so unshadowed, with all the 
liberty of the desert, with all the zest of hardihood in it, 
with no thought for the morrow, and no regret for the 
past, with sleep sound as a mountaineer’s, with strength 
exhaustless as the sea eagle’s. He was leaving it. And 
for what ? For a love that already had cost him a year 
of pain to a few short hours of hope ; for a woman of 
whom he knew nothing — not even whether she were the 
wife or the mistress of another ; for the miserable fever 


190 


IDALIA. 


of restless passion, for the haunting torment of unattaina- 
ble joys, for the intoxication of tempest-tossed desires, for 
the shadows of surrounding doubt and mystery. Better 
far let the strange charm that had enthralled him be cut 
away at any cost, and go back to that old life while there 
was yet time. The thought crossed him for the moment 
as he drifted from the quay of the Golden Horn. The 
next it passed as swiftly ; let him plunge into the recesses 
of Asia or the green depths of Western wilds, he would 
carry with him his passion and her memory; and the ves- 
sel swept down beyond the Dardanelles in her pursuit, 
through the phosphor crests of starlit waves as the night 
deepened, and the distance between them grew less and 
less with every dip the prow made down into the deep- 
gray glistening water, like a petrel that stoops to bathe in 
his passage, and shakes the spray from his spread wings 
to take a freer flight. 

It was evening when she ran into Capri, that Eden 
hung beneath the sea and sky. Ail its marvelous maze of 
color was in its richest glow; the sun was sinking behind 
Solaro ; the towering rocks of the Salto and the Faragli- 
oni burned through their sublimity of gloom ; a luster of 
gold and purple streamed over mountainous Ischia dowu 
on the brow of Epomeneo, and over the low hills of Pro- 
cida ; and the blue water lay dazzling in the light, with 
the white sails of Sorrento skills scarce larger on its 
waves than the white wings of fluttering monachi, while 
over the sea came the odors of budding orange and citron 
gardens and a world of violets that filled the woods, 
sloping upward and upward into the clouds where Ana- 
capri lay. 

Erceldoune saw none of it, yet he felt it vaguely — felt, 
as his vessel steered through that flood of sunlight, com- 
ing from the rich mezzo giorno of the Amalfi coast into 
the golden riot of this lavish loveliness, as though he 
floated to a paradise. So had they thought before him, 
who, sailing through those caressing seas toward the 
same isles where the Syrens sang, had listened to the en- 
chanted song to find their grave, in tumult and in storm. 

The sun sank behind Ischia as he went ashore, and the 
sudden twilight fell, quenching all the blaze of fire, aud 


“UND ICII? ICH LIEB DICII NOCH.” 


191 


bringing in its stead the tender night, with the chime of 
the Ave Maria ringing out from church hells over the sea 

He was known in Capri, and the men showed their 
white teeth with a bright smile, and the girls laughed all 
over their handsome brown faces, as they welcomed him. 

He had little doubt of soon learning what he sought ; a 
few brief questions brought him loquacious answers. 

“ Niursi, signore !” cried a marinaro, in the barbarous 
Capriote patois. “ L’illustrissima Comtessa 1 she knows 
me well. Chiara, my wife, helped the African carry the 
luggage up to her villa the day before yesterday ” 

“ She is here still ?” 

The quick Capriote caught the tremulous excitement 
that ran through the question, and his heart warmed to 
the stranger, by whom his brother had once been brought 
up from the black churning waves under Tiberio in the 
dead of a tempestuous night. 

“ She is here, signor mio ; she has been often here. She 
is at the Villa Santilla, in the Piccola Mariana. I will 
show you the way willingly.” 

“ JN T o, I can find it; 1 know every foot of your island. 
But if you can get me a horse, do.” 

The marinaro put back the gold held out to him with a 
loving gesture, and a smile that glistened through his 
brown beard : 

'‘Not from you, signor. We have not forgotten, in 
Capri here, the night after San Costanza’s Day.” 

Awhile later, and Erceldoune passed up the terraced 
heights, through the woods, where he crushed starry cyclo- 
men and late violets at every step, along hedges of prickly 
pear inclosing vineyards and fields of flax, and down rocky 
winding stairs shut in by walls, over which hung the white 
blossoms of orange boughs. 

Now and then he passed a village priest, or a contadina 
that was like a study for Giorgone, or a tourist party 
whose mules were stumbling down some narrow gorge or 
dense arbutus thicket ; these were all ; the solitude was 
well-nigh unbroken. He knew Capri as well as he knew 
the old Scottish border at home ; many a time, waiting 
week after week at Naples for dispatches, he had explored 
every creek, rock, and islet in that marvelous bay, from 


m 


IDAL1A. 


sunlit Amalfi to nestling Procida, and he made his way 
straight onward to the Piccola Mariana, though slowly, 
from the steepness and the vagaries of the broken Roman 
roads, overgrown with luxuriant vegetation, that his horse, 
a sturdy mountain-trained chestnut from Ischia, climbed 
cautiously. 

A late hour was sounding from some campanile as he 
rode into that beautiful nook that lies turned toward 
Sicily, with its line of fisher-boats and white-walled cot- 
tages fringing the coast, and hidden among olives, cistus 
groves, and orangeries. Here and there — where strangers 
had made their dwelling — lights were gleaming, but the 
Capriotes all lay sleeping under their low rounded roofs ; 
he a!*most despaired of finding any guide to tell him which 
villa was hers in that leafy nest among the sea-girt rocks. 

At last he overtook a contadina heavily laden with wood, 
doing the work of pack-horses, as is the common custom 
for women in the isles of the Syrens ; she knew the name; 
the Contessa had bought some coral of her, for pity’s sake, 
yesterday ; the villa was down there in that little gorge 
just hanging over the sea, where the gray plumes of olive 
were thickest. 

If any had asked it, he could not have answered with 
what definite purpose he went, whether to see her, whether 
to break on her privacy at such an hour, whether only to 
look on the place where she dwelt, and watch till the day 
should dawn ; fixed aim he had none ; he was urged by an 
impulse as vague as it was unconquerable, unregulated 
either by reason or by motive. He was in that mood in 
which chance does its best, or its worst, for a man ; when 
he offers no resistance to it, and may even be hurried into 
guilt ere he knows what he does. 

The lights were shining among the shades of olive and 
arbutus woods as his horse stumbled down the narrow 
defile, catching in the trailing vine tendrils at every step. 

The dwelling literally overhung the sea, nestled on a low 
ridge of rock, curved round so that the whole arc of the 
bay, sweeping from east to west, was commanded by its 
windows, that saw the sun rise over the height of St. An- 
gelo, fall in its noonday glory full on Naples, and Vesu- 
vius, and Raise, where they lie in the depth of that won- 


“UND ICH? ICH LIEB DICH NOCH.” 


193 


drous bow, and pass on to die in purple pomp behind wild 
Ischia. It was surrounded with all the profuse growth of 
the island ; thickets of cistu3, wilderness of myrtle, bud- 
ding fig-trees, orangeries with their crowns of bridal blos- 
som and their balls of amber fruit, while vast rocks rose 
above and shelved beneath it, with columns that towered 
to the clouds, and terraced ledges and broken gorges filled 
up with foliage. Through the leaves he saw the gleam of 
open windows, and the indistinct outline of the roof in the 
deep shade cast from the rocks above ; the road he had 
followed ended abruptly on a narrow table of stone jutting 
out over a precipice whose depth he could not guess ; and 
immediately fronting the casements from which the light 
streamed, divided from the terrace and strip of garden 
running beneath them, by a chasm perhaps some six feet 
wide. Thus from the rock he saw straight into the lighted 
chamber within, as he threw himself from his horse, and 
with his arm round a plane-tree to hold his footing, leaned 
over the edge and strained his eyes through the gloom to 
gaze into the interior that was before him like a picture 
painted on the shadow of the night. His heart stood still 
with a sickening pang, a deadly burning jealousy that had 
never touched his life before. Through the draperies of 
the curtains he saw her, and saw her — not alone. She sat 
at the head of her table, that glittered with wax-lights and 
fruits and wine3, and with her were some six or seven men, 
whose voices only reached him in a low inarticulate mur- 
mur, but whose laughter now and then echoed on his ear 
in the silence. At the foot of the table sat one whom he 
recognized at once ; his back was to the windows, but the 
slight grace of his figure, and the elegance of his throat 
and head, with its closely-cut blond hair, sufficed to identify 
him to Erceldoune. What tie could he have to her, this 
cold, smiling, silken politician, who seemed perpetually by 
her side ? In the warm night he shook as with icy chill- 
ness through all his veins ; a brute longing seized him to 
spring like a lion into that dainty group, and fell them 
down as men of his blood in BothwelPs days had felled 
their foes in Border feuds, 

“ when the loud corynoch rang for war 
Through Lome, Argyle, Monteith, and Braidalbane.** 

n n 


194 


ID ALIA. 


Her other guests were all unknown to him, and looked 
like gentlemen-condottieri ; moreover, all he saw was 
Idalia : she was leaning slightly forward, her face was 
lighted with impassioned warmth, while her eyes, fixed 
upon the man nearest her, an Italian by the contour of his 
features, and of a careless princely bearing, that gave him 
greater distinction than the rest displayed, adjured him 
more eloquently still, than by the words with which her 
lips were moving. 

The echo of her voice, though not the meaning of her 
speech, came to Erceldoune where he swung forward over 
the chasm in the hushed night, sweet and fatal as the Syren 
voices that had used to echo over those eternal seas that 
lapped the beach below. And as he heard it, a heart-sick 
misery seemed to make his life desolate ; he had shaped 
no definite hope, his thoughts had known no actual form, 
but his love unconsciously had colored both hope and 
thought : she so utterly filled his own life, he could not at 
once realize that he was nothing, not even a remembrance 
in hers. 

He leaned nearer and nearer, regardless of the un- 
fathomed precipice that yawned beneath him. At that 
instant Victor Vane rose, pushed back his chair, and ap- 
proached the open glass doors ; looking out from the 
brightly-lighted room, he could see the shadow of the man 
and horse upon the opposite ledge. 

“The Romans hung their wreaths of roses over the 
doors, we in a mere prosaic age must shut our windows,” 
he said, with a light laugh, as he closed the Venetian 
blinds, leaving only their thread-like chinks open for the 
passage of light outward, and the passage of air within. 

A great darkness fronted Erceldoune ; the moon was 
shining on all the silvered seas, and innumerable stars 
were out, but for him the blackness and blindness of night 
had never so utterly fallen. 

Hours passed by uncounted, unheeded by him ; the 
chimes of the campanile bad chimed twelve, and one, and 
two, unheard by him ; he was still there before the dark- 
ened windows. The Ischian horse grazed quietly off the 
grasses and young shoots among the rocks ; Erceldoune 
watched the villa which sheltered her, as a lion watches 
the lair of his foe. 


“UND ICH? ICH LIEB DICH NOCH.” 


195 


The night was absolute torture to him ; intolerable sus- 
pense possessed him, and a reckless hatred of all those who 
were now within the chamber on which he was forbidden 
even to look. So near to her, and yet as far sundered as 
though seas divided them ! His rivals with her while he 
stood without ! — his imagination was filled with their 
looks, their words,' the bold passion in their eyes, the lovely 
smile upon her lips. What were they, what title could 
they claim to her, these men, who seemed so welcome to 
her ? Something in the familiarity, the authority, of the 
Englishman’s action, slight though it was, bore to him a 
terrible significance ; were her revelries such as those for 
which the rose was hung above the doors of Rome ? — 
were they the revelries of a Faustina ? The thought passed 
over him, cold, gliding, poisonous as the coil of a snake ; 
he flung it from him with fierce loathing, true to the motto 
of his old race, “One loyalty, one faith” — he had given 
both to her. He heeded neither time nor place ; purpose 
he had none in staying there ; to watch her life with sus- 
picion or espionage was the last thought in him, the last 
baseness possible to him ; but he could not tear himself 
from the place, he was fascinated to it, even by the very 
torment of his pain. How utterly she must have forgotten 
him ! — how utterly careless must she be of what suffering 
she had dealt him ! As he thought of the look that he 
had seen on her face, as he thonght of those men gathered 
about her while he was absent, he paced the narrow rocky 
ridge like a man chained to his cell, while his foes riot in 
all that he has loved and treasured. And the closed case- 
ments faced him like an inexorable doom, while a faint 
glimmer of light that here and there streamed through 
them seemed to mock him with fugitive tormenting glimpse, 
only serving to make the darkness darker still. 

At last, when the grayness of dawn was breaking, there 
was a slight noise that stirred the stillness : the shutter 
unclosed, the glass door opened, he saw her — alone. There 
was no one now in the apartment, and she stood in the 
open window looking out on the sea that stretched far 
below, round the broken and jutting cliffs. 

He leaned down scarcely breathing, till he hung half 
way over the chasm • was it possible that in this solitude 


i96 


IDAL.A. 


she thought of him ? Were those men anything to her, 
or was he more than they, or nothing ? — not even a regret? 

The moon at that moment strayed through on to the 
ledge, and she saw his shadow hanging midway down over 
the precipice, whose fatal depth, slanted straight into the 
sea which had worn a narrow way through the fissure five 
hundred feet below. A cry of horror broke from her that 
had a greater tenderness in it than lies only iu a mere fear 
for life imperiled ; for all answer he swung himself one 
moment on the ledge, balanced the distance with an unerr- 
ing eye, and with a mountaineer’s leap that the glens and 
hills of the Border had taught him long before, cleared 
the space and alighted at her feet. 

“ Does it matter to you whether I live or die ?” 

The brief prayer bore eloquence deeper than lies in 
ornate words ; all the man’s heart was spent in it; Idalia 
stood motionless and silent, her eyes fixed on him where 
he stood beside her, dropped as from the air upon the wild 
cliffs in the dead of night, when she believed him far dis- 
tant on those eastern shores to which the sea beneath them 
ebbed away through league on league of starlight. 

“Does it matter to you whether I live or die?” he said 
afresh, while his voice quivered with a fiery piteous en- 
treaty. 

“ Surely 1 It mattered to me when you were but a 
stranger.” 

A vivid joy thrilled through him, his eyes in the shadow 
burned down into hers with passionate appeal, with pas- 
sionate reproach. 

“Ay, but it was only a divine pity then , is it that only 
now ? And, with but pity in you for me, how could you 
deal me this last misery ?” 

What stirred her heart he could not tell. 

“ I bade you know no more of me,” she said at last, 
while her eyes looked away from him down into the still 
and silvered seas. “I told you nothing but bitterness 
could come to you from my friendship; nothing else can. 
Why would you not believe me while it was time ?” 

There was an intense and weary raournfulness in the 
words ; they carried a deadly meaning to him, he gave 
them but one significance. 


“ UND ICH? ICH LIEB DICH NOCH.” 191 

“ You mean that even your memory is forbidden me? — . 
that even my worship of you dishonors you ?” 

She drew her hands from him. 

“Your words are as strange as your presence here. 
This is the time and place for neither.” 

“ My words are strange ! God help me ! I hardly know 
what I say. Answer me, in pity’s sake, what are they to 
you ?” 

“Who?” 

And as she spoke, beneath the unbent hauteur of her 
voice and of her glance there was something as nearly 
kindred to anxiety and alarm as could approach Idalia’s 
nature. 

“ Those men who were with you.” 

“ Let me pass, sir. These are not questions for which 
you have right, or to which I give submission.” 

“ I swear they shall be answered I What are they to 
you ?” 

She glanced at him in haughty amaze, tinged with some 
other feeling that he could not translate. 

“ You dare address me thus ! Are you mad ?” 

“ I think so 1” 

“I think so also,” she said, coldly. “And now, sir, 
there is an end of these unwarranted questions, which you 
have as little title to ask as I have inclination to answer. 
Leave me, or let me pass.” 

He stood in her path, half mad as he said : 

“ I will know one thing — are you any man’s wife ?” 

Utter surprise passed over her face, and something of 
contemptuous annoyance. 

“ I reply to nothing asked in such a manner,” she said 
briefly. “ Let me pass, sir.” 

“ No ! Tell me this one thing for the love of pity I” 

The anguish in his voice touched her ; she paused a 
moment. 

“It can concern you in no way,” she answered him dis- 
tantly. “But since you ask it — know that I cherish free- 
dom too well to be wedded.” 

“ I thank God, — I may love you without sin.” 

His voice was very low, and his words had a greater in- 
tensity because their passion was restrained in obedience 

17 * 


198 


IDALIA. 


to her : there was grandeur in their very simplicity. She 
raised her head with her old stag-like gesture — looking to 
the sea, and not to him. 

“Sir, you hace no title to speak such words. You can- 
not say that I have ever given you the faintest.” 

“ Have I ever said it ? No ! you have given me no 
title, but I claim one.” 

“ Claim !” 

“ I claim one. The title that every man has to love, 
though he go unloved — to love better than life, and only 
less than honor.” 

He spoke steadily, undauntedly, as became his own self- 
respect and dignity, but his voice had an accent which told 
her that world wide as the love had been that she had 
roused, none ever had loved her as this man did. For a 
moment she turned and looked at him, a look fleeting, and 
veiled from him by the flickering shadows. The look was 
soon banished, and her eyes strayed backward to the sea ; 
her face was very pale, but she moved away with her proud 
and languid grace : 

“ These words are painful to us both ; — no more of them, 
sir. Farewell.” 

The word struck him as a shot strikes one of his Bor- 
der deer; in the impulse of his agony he caught her trail- 
ing dress, and held it as a sentenced captive might hold 
the purple hem of his sovereign’s robes. 

“ Stay ! A moment ago you said you cared whether I 
lived or died ; — as I live now I will die to-night — in that 
sea at your feet — if you tell me to leave you forever.” 

A shudder ran through her; looking down on him she 
saw that fatigue, long fasting, the misery of the past hours, 
and the force of the feeling he bore her, had unloosed his 
passions and unstrung his nerves till his brain was giddy ; 
and — his calm failing him — she saw that in every likeli- 
hood, as surely as the stars shone above them, he would 
keep his word and fling away his whole existence for her. 

Commonly she was too careless of men’s lives as of their 
peace ; but here she could not be so. She had saved him, 
she could not so soon again destroy him. 

“Hush!” she said more softly. “ The noblest woman 
would never be worth that! It would be better that we 


“UND ICII? ICH IIEB DICH NOGH.” 


199 


ehould part. When I tell you that it can bring you no 
happiness ” 

“ Whatever it bring, I said before, I accept it! My life 
is yours to save or throw away, as you will ; answer me, 
which shall it be ?” 

There was a suppressed violence, a terrible suffering, in 
his voice, that moved her almost with such shuddering 
pain as though she witnessed his death before her sight; 
in the light falling from the opened windows shfc could see 
the burning gleam in his eyes and the red flush that dark- 
ened the bronze of his face. 

“ Live I” she answered him, while her own voice lost its 
chillness. “You do not know now what you say; with 
calmer hours you will see how little worth it I or any wo- 
man could be. You may meet me again, — but you must 
speak no more of such words as you have spoken to-night. 
I have your promise ?” 

“ Till my strength shall fail me to keep it.” 

“When it does, we shall meet no more.” 

Then she left him, and passed through the chamber that 
was opened to the night, till, in the distance, the clustered 
flowers and statues veiled her among them, and the closing 
of a door echoed with a dull sound through the stillness. 

He stood alone on the terrace, the noise of the sea 
surging in his ear, his pulse beating, his brain reeling: 
he could not tell what to believe, what to trust, what to 
think. 

The frank, loyal, single-hearted nature of the man had 
too honest a mould, too masculine a cast, to follow or to 
divine the complex intricacies of a woman’s life, of a wo- 
man’s impulses and motives. He felt blinded, powerless, 
heart-sick, dizzy, now crushed with reckless despair at the 
chili memory of her words, now touched with sweet wild 
hope, because he thought her free to be won if daring, 
fidelity, and devotion could avail to win her. 

To doubt her, never — even now, even with all that he 
had seen and heard — occurred to him. He believed that 
she might only pity him with proud cold pity; he believed 
that it was faintly, remotely possible that by force of his 
own mighty love some tenderness might be at last wakened 
for him in her heart. But between these he saw no path. 


200 


IDALIA. 


He never thought that she might be — but fooling, and 
destroying him. 

He had comparatively seen little of women; nothing of 
such a woman as Idalia. His bold and sanguine nature 
quickly grasped at hope; even in all the humility of his 
love it was not in him to surrender. 

Till morning broke beyond the giant mass of St. Angelo, 
he paced up and down the cliffs, with the waves beating 
music at his feet. Then he flung himself down on the moss 
that covered a ledge of the rock, with his saddle beneath his 
head, as he had lain many a night under Asiatic stars, and on 
Andes slopes, and on yellow Libyan sand ; physical fatigue 
brought sleep, and sleep was gentler to him than his waking 
life, it gave him dreams, and with his dreams Idalia. 


CHAPTER XIY. 

“ SHE SMILES THEM DOWN IMPERIALLY AS VENUS DID THE 
WAVES. ” 

As she passed from him through the embrasure of the 
myrtle-shrouded window, and crossing her reception-room, 
entered an inner chamber, at the farther end stood Victor 
Vane — too far to have heard what had been spoken, yet 
near enough through the suite of apartments to have seen 
out on the terrace above the sea. A few minutes before 
he had left the villa with her other guests, whose boats 
were taking them across to Naples; now he had returned 
and awaited her, half with the familiarity of a man who 
shared her confidence, half with the hesitation of one who 
fears he may give offense. 

“ You are here still ; and so late ! I suppose you bring 
news of importance you could not give before them ? ” she 
said, with a shade of annoyance in the languor of her voice. 
He had approached with a quick step, an eager warmth 
upon his. face; he was checked and chilled, vaguely yet 


SHE SMILES THEM DOWN. 


201 


irresistibly, as he met her glance. He was rarely to bo 
daunted, still less rarely to be shamed; yet he was both 
now. He paused involuntarily, his eyes fell, and words died 
on his lips, as he bowed before her. 

“And your intelligence ?” she asked. 

“Intelligence? Caffradali has deserted us.” 

Idalia lifted her eyebrows. 

“He is as well lost as retained. What else?” 

“You know that the Ducroscs will send twenty thou- 
sand rifles into Poland, and that Falkenstein goes to take 
command of the Towariez?” 

She gave a gesture of impatience. 

“He will ‘command’ them when they are organized — • 
when! It was I who sent him. This can scarcely be your 
intelligence — your intelligence that will not wait till to- 
morrow ?” 

He hesitated, with a strangely novel embarrassment upon 
him. 

“ I waited — to congratulate you on your conquest of the 
Prince to the cause.” 

A light of triumph gave its pride to her eyes, and its 
warmth to her brow; she smiled, as with the memory of 
victory. 

“Viana! Yes — it is something to have secured him, 
semi-Bourbon that he is ! But I still remain at a loss 
to imagine why you reappear at this time of the night.” 

A flush of anger heated the delicate coldness of her 
listener’s face, his silken and gentle courtesies were forgot- 
ten for the moment. 

“Such an hour, madame ! It is not too late for that 
wild wanderer yonder to be favored with an interview !” 

The moment the words escaped him he repented them; 
he knew how rash they were with the nature and disdainful 
dignity of the woman to whom he spoke. Idalia cast one 
glance on him of superb indifference; but she gave no be- 
trayal of surprise, not even of disquiet, far less of embar- 
rassment. 

“If you only came to arraign my actions, I will be 
obliged to you to retire.” 

“ Wait 1 Hear me first ! I can act indifference no longer. 
I came back to-night for one thing only — to tell you what 


202 


IDALIA. 


you know, as well as you know that the stars shine yonder 
— that I love you !” 

She heard him with that same royal indifference, and 
ironic amusement. 

“I think we are too well acquainted with each other for 
this. I gave you more credit than to suppose you would 
talk in this fashion.’ 7 

He looked up at her with a passionate pain ; he had been 
heartless, and been proud of his heartlessness; he had 
mocked all his life through at what other men felt and suf- 
fered, and passion or tenderness had been alike the subject 
of his most cutting sneer; but — for the moment, at least — 
his creed had deserted him, his wisdom and his sarcasm 
had failed him; for the moment he loved, as utterly as 
ever a lover did, and he felt powerless to make her credit 
it. But eloquence was always at his bidding, and eloquence 
came now; every honeyed flattery, every imploring eager- 
ness, every impassioned pleading, that could warm or shake 
the heart of the woman who heard him, poured from his 
lips. Persuasive always, he was a thousandfold more so 
now that for the first time in his existence genuine passion 
had broken up his callousness, and a sense of hopelessness 
shivered his self-reliance. He loved her, if it were but a 
mingling of desire, of ambition, of senses intoxicated by 
her beauty, of pride piqued by her disdain ; and he felt im- 
potent to make her even believe this — far more impotent 
to make her accept it. 

She heard him without interruption, smiling a little as 
she heard ; she was half wearied, half amused, as at a 
comedy known and stale from custom, yet amusing because 
well acted. 

“ Monsieur, I gave you credit for better taste,” she said, 
quietly, as he paused. “I have had so much of this so 
often; granted you are unusually eloquent, unusually 
graceful, but even with those accessories the tale is very 
tiresome; and it has one great drawback, you see — we 
neither of us believe it!” 

“ Believe ! how can I make you believe ? I tell you 
that ever since I saw you first I have been so changed that 
I have wondered if I lived or dreamed; I have felt all 
that once I disdained as only fit for boys and fools 1 


SHE SMILES THEM DOWN. 


203 


What more can I tell you ? — you must know that I speak 
truth.’ 7 

“ What a recantation ! I am not a fitting hearer for it 
at all, nor likely to appreciate it. I will thank you far 
more to amuse me with your bonmots, which are really 
good, than to entertain me with your efforts in Romeo’s 
strain, which, though very pretty, are very stale !” 

“ Wait! — for pity’s sake. Doubt what you will, mock 
at what you will, but believe at least that I love you I” 

She laughed softly. 

“ We do not believe in love — nous autres ! ” 

“And yet men have gone to their death only for love of 
you !” 

“No proof of wisdom if they did 1” 

A little while before he had thought as she thought ; a 
few months earlier and his incredulity of every such mad- 
ness and emotion was not more scornful than her own ; 
now, intoxicated with the disdainful beauty of the only 
woman who had ever cost him a moment’s pang, he be- 
lieved in all the wildest follies of romance, and would have 
staked everything he owned on earth, or wagered on the 
future, to move her and to win her. For the only time in 
his life he was baffled, for the only time powerless. Hi3 
hands clinched where he stood before her. 

“ Hear me at the least before you banish me. Listen ! 
what is there we might not compass together ? You adore 
sovereignty, it should go hard if I did not give it you. 
You are ambitious, your ambition cannot overleap mine. 
We are both against the world, together we would subdue 
it. Empty thrones have fallen to hands bold enough to 
grasp them as they reel through revolutions; you and I 
might wear a crown if our aims and power were one. Love 
me, and there is no height I will not raise you to, no ordeal 
I will not pass through for you, no living man who shall 
baffle or outrun me. I have the genius that rules worlds 
— I would lay one at your feet.” 

Every word that he uttered he meant ; in the excitation 
of the instant, sweeping down all the suave and hardened 
coldness of his temperament, he felt the power in him to 
do and to dare greatly ; he felt that for her, through her, 


204 


ID ALIA. 


with her, there should be no limit to the ambition and the 
triumph of his life ; he spoke wildly, blindly, exaggeratedly, 
but he spoke with an exaltation that for the second made 
him a nobler and truer man than he had been in all the 
cool scorn of his wisdom and his mockery. Yet he did not 
move her, much less did he win her. 

She looked at him with a smile in her eyes, and a haughty 
languor in her attitude. She — merciless from knowing the 
world too well, and gifted with a penetration far beyond 
the common range of women — saw that the gold offered 
her was adulterated ; that the springs of his speech were 
as much self-love as love. 

“ I understand you,” she said, as he paused. “ I could 
advance your ambitions well, and you would be glad that 
I should do so ; your vanity, your policy, your schemes, 
and — perhaps a little, too — your admiration, are all ex- 
cited and chime in with another one ; and that compound 
you call love. Well, it is as good a name for it as any- 
thing else. But as for thrones ! I thought we called our- 
selves Liberalists and Redressers ? Crowns scarcely hang 
in the air like roses, as you seem to think, for any passer- 
by to gather them ; but if they do, how do you reconcile 
the desire for one with all your professions of political 
faith? I suppose, then, like most democrats, you only 
struggle against tyranny that you may have the right in 
turn to create yourself Tyrannis ?” 

His hands closed on a cluster of rhododendrons in the 
window, and tore them down with an unconscious gesture. 
In a measure he was wronged ; he loved her enough in 
that moment to have renounced every ambition and every 
social success for her, and he could not make her even be- 
lieve that any feeling was in him. In a measure, too, her 
satire was right, and pierced him the more bitterly because 
it laid bare so mercilessly all that was confused and unac- 
knowledged to himself. In his pain in her contempt, he 
hated her almost as much as he loved her, and the old 
barbaric leaven of jealousy, that he had used to ridicule 
as the last insanity of fools, broke out despite all self-respect 
that would have crushed it into silence. 

“ You are very pitiless, madame 1” he said in his teeth. 
“Do you deal as mockingly with that beggared courier 


SHE SMILES THEM DOWN. 


205 


whom you favor with interviews at an hour you think un- 
timely for lovers less distinguished !” 

Her glance swept over him with the grand amazement 
of one whom no living man ever arraigned. He could not 
tell whether his insult moved her one whit for sake of the 
man whom his jealousy seized as his rival ; hut he saw that 
it had forever ruined all hope for himself. She looked at 
him calmly, with a contempt that cut him like a knife. 

“I did not know that my wines were so strong or your 
head so weak. If you transgress the limits of courtesy, I 
must transgress those of hospitality, and — dismiss you.” 

He knew that it was as vain to seek to move or sway 
her from that serene indifference, as to dash himself against 
the Capri rocks in striving to uproot them ; yet in his des- 
peration he lost all the keen and subtle tact, the fine in- 
scrutable ability, that had never failed him save with her. 
He laid his hands on the sweeping folds of her dress, with 
the same gesture of entreaty that Erceldoune had used in 
the unconscious vehemence of his prayer. 

“ Idalia — stay ! Take heed before you refuse my love, 
for love it is, God help me.” 

She drew the laces from him, and moved away. , 

‘‘You have as much belief in the name you invoke, mon- 
sieur, as I have in the love for which you invoke it ! Come ! 
we alike know the world too well for this comedietta not 
to weary both. You must end it, or I.” 

“ No ! — hear me out,” he said fiercely, almost savagely, 
for one whose impassive gentleness had commonly been his 
choicest mask and weapon. “ Think twice before you re- 
fuse any toleration to my love. Take that , and you shall 
make me your slave; refuse it, and you will never have had 
a foe such as you shall find in me. Remember — you can- 
not brave me lightly, you cannot undo the links that con- 
nect us, you cannot wash out my knowledge of all that you 
have held most secret. Remember whose thoughts and 
acts and intrigues I have in rny keeping. I know what 
you would give all your loveliness in tribute to me to bribe 

me from uttering to the world ” 

“You try intimidation? I accredited you with better 
breeding and less melodrama,” said Idalia, her careless 
negligence unruffled, as with a bow like that with which 

18 


206 


IDALIA. 


queens dismiss their courts, she passed from the chamber 
ere he could follow or arrest her ; — it would have been a 
man boldei and more blinded still than he was who should 
have dared to do either. 

He was left there alone, in the midst of the white warm 
light and of the burnished leaves swaying against the mar- 
ble columns; to his lips oaths never came, he was too finely 
polished, but an imprecation was hurled back upon his 
heart that cursed her with a terrible bitterness, and a 
hatred great as was his baffled passion. lie hated her for 
his own folly in bending to the common weakness of men ; 
he hated her for the disdainful truth with which she had 
penetrated the mixed motives in his heart; he hated her 
for the shame she had put upon him of offering her a re- 
jected and despised passion ; he hated her for ail the num- 
berless sorceries of her fascination, of her brilliance, of her 
pride, which had made him weak as water before their 
spell. To win her there was nothing he would have 
checked at ; she had become the incarnation of his am- 
bitions, as she might have been the means of their fruition ; 
all that gave her danger to other men but gave her added 
intoxication for him ; she would have been to him, had 
she but loved him, what the genius and the beauty of she 
whom they called Hellas Rediviva were to Tallien. And 
more bitter than pride stung, or vanity pierced, or am- 
bition shattered, was the sense that love her as he had, 
love her as he would, consume his very heart for her sake 
as he might, he would never — plead, beseech, swear, or 
prove it as he should — make her believe that one pulse of 
love beat in him. 

And all the by-gone ironies and contemptuous scoffs 
which he had used to cast on those who suffered for the 
lost smile of a woman’s eyes came back upon him now, 
laughing in his ear and jibing at his weakness like fantastic 
devils mocking at his fall. A woman had enthralled him ; 
and his philosophies were dead — corpses that lay cold and 
powerless before him, incapable of rallying to his rescue, 
things of clay without a shadow’s value 


THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 


m 


CHAPTER XV. 

THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 

The early morning broke on Capri ; with the rising of 
the sun the little fleet of boats all down the shore began to 
flutter into motion as the birds fluttered into song, the 
Angelus rang, the full daylight glittered over the white 
line of towns and villages that nestled far and wide in the 
bow of the bay, in the transparent air a delicate feathery 
column of gray smoke curled up from the cone of Vesuvius ; 
the cliffs rose up in the sunlight, vine-covered, and standing 
like pillars out in the midst of the sea, while the mists were 
still hanging over that deep blue western depth, stretching 
out and on to the Mediterranean, farther and farther to- 
ward the columns of Hercules and the gates of the African 
and Asian worlds. 

In her own chamber, a morning-room whose windows, 
clustered round with trained myrtle and clematis, looked 
out down the shelving cliff on to the sea, Idalia stood ; her 
head was bent, her eyes were grave and filled with thought, 
and her lips had as much of disdain as of melancholy; she 
looked a woman to dare much, to reign widely, to submit 
rarely, to fear never. Yet she was in bondage now. 

At a breakfast table, a little distance from her sat Con- 
rad, Count Phaulcon. He was smoking, having finished 
with the coffee and claret, fruit and fish beside him, and 
was looking at her under his lashes, a look half wary, half 
admiring, half angered, half exultant, the look of a man 
foiled in holding her by intimidation, but successful in 
holding her by power, yet not wholly at his ease with her, 
nor wholly so with himself. 

“If you would only hear reason, ” he said, impatiently; 
he had vanquished her in one sense, but in another she was 
still his victor, and he was restless under it. 

“I am happy to hear reason,” she answered coldly, “but 
of dishonor I am — a little tired I” 


203 


IDALIA. 


There was a certain listless satiric bitterness in the last 
words. 

“ Dishonor 1” echoed Phaulcon, while the blood flushed 
over his forehead, and he moved irritably “ How strangely 
yon phrase things ! What has changed yon so ? For a 
woman of the world, a woman of your acumen, of your 
experience, of your brilliancy ! — to pause and draw back 
for such puerile after-thoughts — I cannot in the least com- 
prehend it. What a scepter you hold 1 Bah I stronger 
than any queen’s. Queens are mere fantoccini — marion- 
ettes crowned for a puppet-show, and hung on wires that 
each minister pulls after his own fancy; but you have a 
kingdom that is never limited, except at your own choice; 
an empire that is exhaustless, for when you shall have lost 
your beauty, you will still keep your power. You smile, 
and the politician tells you his secret; you woo him, and 
the velvet churchman unlocks his intrigues; you use your 
silver eloquence, and you save a cause or free a country. 
It is supreme power, the power of a woman’s loveliness, 
used as you use it, with a statesman’s skill.” 

She smiled slightly ; but the haughty carelessness and 
resistance of her attitude did not change. Those per- 
suasive, vivacious, hyperbolic words, — she remembered how 
fatal a magic, how alluring a glamour such as they once 
had for her; they had no charm now, they had long ceased 
to have any. 

“A supreme power 1” pursued Phaulcon. “ In the rose- 
water of your hookahs you steep their minds in what color 
you will. With the glauce of your eyes, you unnerve their 
wills, and turn them which way you choose. In an opera 
supper you enchant their allegiance to what roads you like; 
in the twilight of a boudoir you wind the delicate threads 
that agitate nations. You are in the heart of conspiracies, 
in the secrets of cabinets, in the destinies of coalitions, and 
with Fascination conquer, where reason would fail. It is 
the widest power in the world ; it is that of Antonina, of 
Marcia, of Olympia, of Pompadour ! What can be lacking 
in such a life ?” 

“Only what was wanting in theirs — honor!” 

The words were spoken very calmly, but there was not 
the less meaning in them. 


THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 


209 


“ Honor ! What makes you all in a moment so in love 
with that word ? There was a time when you saw nothing 
but what was triumph in your career.” 

“ It is not for you to reproach me with that.” 

Over his changing, handsome, eloquent features a cer- 
tain flush and shadow came. 

“ Reproach ! I would rather reproach you with the 
change. And why should there be this continued estrange- 
ment between us, Idalia? You loved me once.” 

Her eyes dwelt on his musingly, very mournfully, with 
that luster of disdain that was in them, mingled with a mo- 
mentary wistfulness of recollection. 

“Yes, I loved you once,” she answered, and her voice 
had an excessive gentleness in it ; but he knew her mean- 
ing too well to ask why it was that this was now solely 
and irrevocably of the past. 

lie was silent some moments ; the dashing and reckless 
Free Lance felt an embarrassment and a sense of mor- 
tification in her presence. He could hold this haughty 
and exquisite woman in a grip of steel, and feel a savage 
victory in forcing the proud neck that would not bend, to 
lie beneath his heel ; he could take a refined exultation of 
cruelty in seeing her pride rebel, her instincts recoil, her 
dignity suffer mutely; he could amuse himself with all this 
with a rich pleasure in it. Nevertheless, he owed her many 
and heavy debts;* he gave her an admiration that was 
tinged still with a strange tyrannous wayward sort of love ; 
he held her in an unwilling homage that made him half 
afraid of her, and he shrank under the sense of her censure 
and of her rebuke. 

In one sense he was her master, but in another she was 
far above him, in another she was his ruler, and escaped 
his power. 

He rose restlessly ; the glance he gave her was doubtful 
and embarrassed, and his tone was half appealing, half im- 
perious. 

“ Well, there is one thing, I want more money.” 

“You always want money !” 

There was a weary scorn in her words, the scorn of a 
proud woman forced into companionship with what has 
sunk too utterly in her eyes for any other feeling save that 
only of an almost compassionate contempt. 


210 


IDALIA. 


Phaulcon laughed; not oecause he was impervious to 
the contempt, but because the temper of the man was 
really lightly and idly insouciant, careless as any butterfly, 
except in hate. 

“Of course! who doesn’t? Is there anything money 
won’t buy, from a woman’s love to a priest’s absolution ? 
Tell me that! A man without money is like a man born 
into the world without his eyes or his legs ; he exists, he 
doesn’t live; he hibernates miserably, he never knows 
what it is to enjoy ! Who are the kings of the earth ? 
The Hopes, the Pereires, the Rothschilds, the Barings. 
War could not be begun, imperial crowns would never 
come out of pawn, nations would collapse in bankruptcies, 
thrones would crash down to the dust, and nobles turn 
crossing-sweepers, without them. Who rule Europe, kings, 
ministers, cabinets, troops? Faugh ! not one whit of it — • 
the Capitalists! Which was the potentate, the great 
Emperor who owed the bond, or the great Fugger who 
could afford to put it in the fire ? Yes, I do want money. 
Can you let me have any?” 

Her lips moved slightly, she restrained whatever words 
might rise to them, but she did not repress the disgust that 
was spoken silently on them. 

“You wish to ruin my fortune now?” 

“Far from it,” laughed Phaulcon. “I am not like the 
boy who killed his goose of the golden eggs. I would not 
ruin you on any account; but even if I did, you know very 
well that any one of your friends would willingly make 
up any breaches I caused in your wealth.” 

Where she stood, with one hand leaning idly on the 
carved ivory of a chess-king, she turned with a sudden 
gesture. He had broken down her haughty silence, her 
studied contemptuous tranquillity at last. A flush rose 
over her brow, her lips quivered, not with fear, but with 
loathing; her eyes flashed fire. All the gentleness that in 
her moments of abandonment characterized her, and all 
the languor that at other hours made her so indolently and 
ironically indifferent, changed into a fearless defiance, the 
more intense from its force of contrast with the restrained 
serenity of her past self-control 

“One other word like that and you never enter my pres* 


THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 2il 

ence again, if to be free from you I close the gates of a 
convent on my own life. . What! are you so vile as that ? 
Is all shame lost in you ?” 

If it were not, there were moments when he was as bad 
a man as the world held, when the devil in him was alone 
victorious, and all conscience that had ever lingered was 
crushed out and forgotten. Her words, and yet far more, 
her look, lashed all that was evil in his nature to its height. 

He laughed aloud. 

“ ‘A world of scorn looks beautiful 1 in you, that I grant, 
Eccellenza ! At the same time your title to it is not quite 
clear. It is for the women who go to Courts to smile with 
that superb disdain, to answer with that proud defiance — 
not for the Countess Yassalis !” 

There was not much in the words themselves, but in 
their tones there was an intolerable insolence, an intoler- 
able insult. The fire in her eyes burned deeper still, her 
breath came rapidly, her whole form was instinct with a 
passion held in rein, rather for sake of her own dignity 
than for any more timorous thing. Standing in that 
haughty wrath, that self-enforced restraint, she looked like 
some superb stag, some delicate antelope, at bay, and 
panting to spring on its foes. 

“Do you think such taunts as that — your taunts ! have 
power to wound me for one instant? Where is your 
boasted wisdom ? It has forsaken you strangely, as 
strangely as your memory ! Whatever I have lost, the 
loss is due to you; whatever I have erred in, the error lies 
with you ; whatever wreck my life has made, is wrecked 
through you; whatever taint is on my name, was brought 
there first by you. You have tried my patience long and 
often; you have tried it once too much. You have trusted 
to the tie that is between us ; it is broken forever as if it 
had not been. Insult through you I have continually borne. 
What the world has said has been as nothing to me, my 
life is not ruled by it, my honor is not touched by it. But 
insult from you I will never bear. Be my destroyer as you 
choose ; but your accomplice again you shall never make 
me — nor your dupe. Stand aside, sir, I will hear no more 
words.” 

He had laid his hand upon her arm, she shook him off 


212 


ID ALIA. 


with an action as intense in its gesture of contempt as her 
words had been intense in their concentrated passion, and 
swept beyond him toward the doorway of her chamber. 

Phaulcon sprang before her, and stood between her and 
the closed doors; there was a taint of cowardice in his 
nature, and he had forgotten all policy when he had let 
malice and vengeance hurry him into an open rupture with 
one who was beyond all others needful to him, and who, 
whatever her foes, whatever her faults, still never feared. 

“ Idalia ! — wait.” 

“Let me pass, sir.” 

“No, by Heaven 1 not in such a mood.” 

“You wish to compel me to summon my household ?” 

“I wish to induce you to hear reason.” 

“Your euphuistic synonym for some new villainy? I 
have answered you already.” 

“ Softly, softly ! It will not do for us to quarrel. You 
know the terms on which alone you can make such an an- 
swer final.” 

“Your persecution? I am indifferent to it. Allow me 
to pass.” 

“ Pardon me, no. The terms I meant were — the break- 
ing of your oath.” 

He spoke very gently, yet at the words she turned pale 
for the first time in their interview, as though he had 
pierced her where she was without shield ; she did not re- 
ply, and he pursued his advantage. 

“ Tell me, — will your new and eccentric fancy for * honor 7 
be greatly gratified by the deliberate rupture of your sworn 
word? When men and women talk much of their honor, 
to be sure they are always conscious of having lost it, or 
being just about to lose it with a more flagrant bankruptcy 
than common; but still, your newly-adopted principle will 
be ill commenced by the repudiation of your pledged oath, 
of your bound engagement.” 

Still she said nothing, only in her eyes suppressed pas- 
sion gleamed, and her hand clinched as though, but for 
her dignity’s sake, it would have found force to strike him 
where he stood. 

Conrad Phaulcon smiled. 

“ I am no tyrant, no harsh task -master, my most beauti- 


THE ALLEGORY OP THE POMEGRANATE. 


213 


ful Countess, and I frankly admit that I admire you more 
in your haughty rebellion than I do in the softest smile 
with which you enchant all our good friends. I exact no- 
thing. I command nothing. I merely remind you — you 
cannot break from me without also breaking your promise, 
and more than your promise — your oath. However, a 
woman’s word, I suppose — even when it is sworn, even 
when it is the word of such a woman as yourself, who have 
none of your sex’s weaknesses — is only given to be broken. 
Is it so ?” 

She answered nothing still; a slight quick shudder of 
hatred or of contempt passed over her one moment; she 
was torn inwardly with such a conflict as the prisoner on 
parole feels when he might break his fetters away, and 
strive, at least, for the sweet chance of liberty, were he not 
held back by one torturing memory — his word. 

Suddenly she turned and bent rapidly toward him, her 
eyes looking into his with so full and brilliant a luster of 
unuttered scorn, that he started and drew back. 

“ You sell everything — your body and your soul I What 
bribe would you take to give me my release ?” 

“What bribe? None! You are much more to me, my 
exquisite Idalia, than any gold, well as I love the little 
god. ‘Bribe!’ What an ugly word! Bribes are like 
medicines; every one takes them, but no one talks about 
them. Your ‘release,’ too ! when you live as free as air !” 

She said no more, but stood aloof from him again in 
haughty and enforced composure. 

“Leave my presence, or let me "pass out,” she said, 
briefly. “One or the other.” 

“ Either, with pleasure, if you will give me two answers. 
First, will you break your oath ?” 

The look that gave so much of heroism and of grandeur 
to her beauty passed across it; to stoop to supplication to 
him would have been as utterly impossible to her as to 
have put down her neck beneath his heel, and though she 
could not break his bonds, she was not vanquished by him. 
She answered with a calm endurance that obeyed, not him, 
but the law of her own nature : 

“No.” 

“Ah, that is well and wise, ma belle. Now for the 
other question. You will give me the money?” 


214 


IDALIA. 


“ No.” 

The reply was precisely the same as it had been before : 
the triumph in his eyes fell. 

‘‘And why not?” 

“Because every sum I gave you now would seem given 
because I feared you. Fall as low as that, you know well 
enough that I shall never do. As far as you hold me by 
my oath, so far I will hold myself bound, no farther ; for 
the rest I have said — all is canceled henceforward betweeu 
us.” 

“What? Do you mean that you deny my title to my 
power on you ? Do you mean that it can ever be possible 
for your mere will to cancel such a tie as there is between 
us ? Do you mean that, if you pretend to forget the past 
and all my claims on you, I shall ever allow them to be 
forgotten ?” 

“ ‘ Forgotten?’ No. It is not so easy to forget. But 
trade on them longer, I have said, you shall never do. I 
have endured your exactions too many years already.” 

“ But, by Heaven ! then I insist — ” 

“ You cannot insist. If you need money, you know the 
price of it : my release from you, as far as you have the 
power to bestow it. On other terms, you will never again 
live on my gold. The choice will be for you.” 

“ But I demand- ” 

“You can demand nothing, sir.” 

And with a movement that even now did not stoop to 
be hurried, or lose in any sort its dignity, she swept by 
him before he could arrest her, passed through the door, 
and closed it. 

He knew Idalia well enough to know that to force him- 
self on her, or seek to intimidate her into compliance with 
his will, would be as utterly vain as to seek to quarry with 
a razor the great black heights of Tiberio towering yonder 
in the light. Half the victory was. in his hands, half in 
aers. To gain the rest, he knew that he must wait. 

He left her, and went out across the gardens and down 
the winding way that led along the rocks to the shore. 
He was not wholly satisfied with his morning’s work ; he 
felt the mute resistance of a proud nature against a power 
of which he was tyrannously and inexorably jealous, and 


THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 


215 


he knew that this power did not extend over her money, of 
which he had often received much, of which he was always 
wanting to receive more. Besides, with all his evil triumph 
in galling and goading her to his uttermost ingenuity, a 
certain shame was always on him before Idalia, and a cer- 
tain love for her always survived in his heart ; love that 
was always strangely blent with something of unwilling 
homage, of reluctant awe, and, now and then, of absolute 
repentance. 

He would not have undone one of the links of the fet- 
ters he had made her wear under the purple-hemmed and 
gold-broidered robes of her beauty, freedom, and suprem- 
acy; but at the same time, in her presence or freshly from 
it, he felt ashamed of having forged them. Long habit 
had killed almost everything in him that had once been a 
little better ; but Conrad Pkaulcon had still here and 
there certain flashes of conscience left. 

As he went toward the beach, round a sharp point of 
rock abruptly jutting out with its hanging screen of ivy 
and myrtle, ere he looked where he went, his foot was 
almost against the arm of a man lying there, in the shadow, 
asleep. 

Erceldoune lay on the grass, the horse standing motion- 
less beside him ; his limbs were stretched out in all their 
careless magnificence of strength, his head had fallen 
slightly back, his chest rose and fell with the calm breath- 
ings of a deep repose, and as the morning light slanted 
through a fissure of the cliffs it was full upon his face, from 
which in repose the dauntless light, the eagle fire, had 
gone, and only had left now a profound and serene melan- 
choly. . 

It was yet early ; sleep had only come to him as the sun 
had risen, after hours of intense excitement, and a night of 
extreme bodily fatigue. There was nothing to awaken him 
here, and lulled by the pleasant murmur of the seas and 
the warmth of the young day, he dreamt on still. The 
Greek started violently, and a fierce panther-like longing 
was the first thing that seized him, mingled with supreme 
amazement ; a ferocious vindictiveness darkened and flushed 
the glory of his face ; he paused, his lips a little parted, 
his teeth ground, his whole form quivering with the long- 


216 


IDALIA. 


ing to spring ; his temperament was intensely vivacious, 
and years had done nothing to chill if they had done much 
to harden him, and little by little he had so gathered up 
his hatred toward the man he had injured, that it was as 
great as though that injury had been received, instead of 
given, by him. 

He stooped over the sleeper, noting the unarmed power- 
lessness of that slumber, while his teeth clinched, his 
glance wandered by sheer instinct toward a loose, weighty, 
mallet-like mass of granite lying near him. One blow 
from it in a sure hand, and the life would be still before it 
could waken for a struggle, a shout, a sigh. 

“ I might crush out his brains as easily as a fly, and, by 
God, I could do it, too I” he thought, in a fierce blindness 
of hatred that remembered only that night ride through 
the pomegranates, and forgot all the vileness of his own 
brutality toward this man who lay sleeping at his feet. 

Without waking, Erceldoune stirred slightly, his right 
hand that lay open, clinched ; he turned with a restless 
sigh — he was dreaming of ldalia still. At the movement 
his foe cowered, and drew back involuntarily ; pusilla- 
nimity ran in his blood, and he had a keen dread of this 
‘'Border Eagle,” who had been invulnerable under so 
many shots, and had had a resurrection almost from the 
grave ; a dread nearly as strong as his hate for him. 
Moreover, with that action he remembered many things, 
policy before all, which forbade him to attempt any risk of 
reckoning with the man he had left for dead in the Carpa- 
thians. He took one long glance at him — the glance of 
hatred is as lingering as that of love, and of still surer rec- 
ollection — then hastily and noiselessly turned aside over 
the thick grasses, and went his way down to the beach. 

It was not through any sense of shame or of humanity 
that he left the sleeping man unharmed, it was not even 
that he would have shrank from crushing the life out of 
him as mercilessly as out of a cicada; it was only that he 
remembered the danger and unwisdom of such self-indul- 
gence, and also, in some faint emotion, he felt a sense that 
ldalia was near them both — too near for him to sink into 
such crime as this. In his own way he loved her, in his 
own way revered her, though he cared nothing how he 


THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 


217 


tortured, almost as little how he ruined her. While under 
her influence he could not be his worst. 

An hour later he had crossed the bay, and approached a 
palazetto smothered in orange-trees, whose terraces over- 
hung the sea, odorous, and shaded deep with myrtle. He 
made his way unannounced, and passing through several 
chambers entered one in which he found the temporary 
owner of the house, who looked up wearily and listlessly — 
the owner was Victor Vane. 

“ Well,” he asked, as the door closed. 

“ That Scotl That courier I” panted Fhaulcon, “he is 
in Capri. I passed him lying asleep on the grass ; I could 
have killed him like a dog. Does he know Idalia? Is 
it possible he can have learnt that it was she who saved 
him ?” 

“Know Idalia? Yes, beyond doubt, he knows her.” 

“ He does ? She never named him to me l” 

“ Very possibly ; but you remember how she saved him, 
and Miladi has her caprices I — she had him with her day 
after day in the East.” 

The words were languid still ; there was no irritation 
expressed in them, but there was a significance for which, 
had Erceldoune been there, the speaker would have been 
hurled out on to his terrace with as little ceremony as 
though he had been dead Border grouse. 

Even his comrade and sworn ally darted a look on him 
savage, passionate, but withal that better than any look he 
had given, for a hot and frank wrath was in it, with some- 
thing of generous challenge. 

“ What do you mean by that?” 

“ I mean what I say — no more. This gentleman — your 
Carpathian friend — found her out while he was chasing 
what he very absurdly calls his ‘ assassin 9 down the Bos- 
phorus shore ; he dined with her when we were there, and 
the Countess appeared to take a very flattering interest in 
the landless laird. He is a handsome giant, you know, 
and 1 have often noticed that your women of intellect 
have a wonderful eye for physical perfections 1” 

With every quiet word he plunged a stab of steel into 
his listener’s heart, with every one he veiled more closely 
the passions that were moving in his own. The color 

19 


218 


ID ALIA. 


changed in Phaulcon’s face, he writhed under every sylla- 
ble, but he could resist none ; the same merciless tyranny 
as he had exercised over Idalia was used over him now, 
and he had not the fearless and haughty strength which 
was in hers that could have enabled him to defy or to dis- 
dain it. 

“ In the East — in the East ?” he muttered. “ With 
her ? — and she never told me !” 

“Caro! Did you imagine you had your fair Countess’s 
confidence? I can assure you you are excessively mis- 
taken.” 

Phaulcon shook in all his limbs with restrained passion. 
Well as he knew the art of word-torturing, he was scarce 
so perfect an adept in it as his friend. 

“ Do you mean ” he began impetuously, and paused. 

Yane laughed, rose, and sauntered a little way from the 
table. 

“Have you breakfasted? Do I mean what? Just taste 
one of these citrons; they are the first ripe this season. 
Do I mean that your friend, the Border Chief, has lost his 
head after the Countess Yassalis? Yes, I do mean it. He 
is wildly in love with her, and he has eyes that say so re- 
markably well, considering that he had loved nothing but 
tiger-shooting and hard riding till that charming piece of 
romance in the Carpathians.” 

The words were easy, indifferent, a little flippant and 
contemptuous; they stung the Greek like so many scor- 
pions. He flung himself out of his seat, and paced to and 
fro the apartment with fierce breathless oaths ground out 
on his lips. Yane looked at him with an admirable af- 
fectation of amused astonishment. 

“Pace, pace, caro /” he said, softly. “Why will you 
always be so impetuous? Yesuvius yonder, who looks 
rather dangerous to-day by-the-by, was never more im- 
pulsive 1 What annoys you so much in this colossal 
courier being in love with Miladi Idalia ? He is not the 
first by many a score !” 

Conrad Phaulcon swung round and strode up to his tor- 
mentor. 

“By Heaven, if you taunt me, or scoff at her with 
that ” 


THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 


219 


“Gently, gently, trks cher ! We do not quarrel. Be- 
sides, there is really no object in assuming all that with 
me. Just recollect how long I have known you — and how 
well 1” 

Phaulcon was silenced, and lashed into obedience : his 
head dropped; he turned again, and paced the chamber 
with fast uneven steps. 

“ This idea annoys you,” pursued his counselor, leisurely. 
“I grant his presence is troublesome, awkward indeed for 
you ; and Scotch patience with Spanish fire is a disagree- 
able combination. Besides, your own excessive impetu- 
osity made that little affair very notorious ; if he were to 
recognize you, I fear, do what you would, something ex- 
tremely unpleasant would result. Still, with due caution 
this might not happen, and no danger need occur from it 
if Idalia do not betray you, and that she probably will not 

do, unless — unless ” Victor paused a moment, and 

let his eyes drop on his companion. “ He is a magnificent 
man to look at, and adores her in all good faith, which 
might have the charm of novelty,” he added, in a musing 
whisper. 

“Damnation! I would lay her dead at my feet if I 
thought ” 

Vane raised his hand in deprecation. 

“ Pray do not be so very excessive ! That language was 
all very well in the middle ages ; both you and Sir Fulke 
Erceldoune have dropped in on us by mistake, out of the 
Crusades. But your brilliant Idalia is not a woman to be 
murdered. In the first place, she is too beautiful ; in the 
second, she is too notorious; in the third, a glance of her 
eyes would send any assassin back again unnerved and un- 
strung. No; you must neither kill him, nor kill her. The 
idea ! What barbarism, and what blundering. It is only 
— excuse me — madmen who use force ; is it not their own 
necks that pay the penalty ?” 

“But do you mean that she has any sort of feeling for 
this accursed Scot?” 

The other smiled. 

“ Dear friend, is it for me to say what new caprice your 
fair Countess’s will may indulge in? Certainly, if one 


220 


IDALIA. 


might attribute such a provinciality to the most accom* 
plished woman of her time, I should have said, by the little 
I saw in Constantinople, that she did feel some sort of 
tenderness to your Titan of an enemy. At least, she made 
him win at baccarat, bade me harm him ‘at my peril , 7 and 
spent the hours alone with him in a very poetic manner. 
Though really I cannot imagine why she should smile on 
a penniless Queen 7 s Messenger, except by the feminine rule 
of contradiction l 77 

Lashing him like the separate cords of a scourge, each 
word fell on his listener’s ear. Yane watched his fury with 
gratified amusement; this thing had been bitter beyond all 
conception to him, lightly and idly as he purposely spoke 
of it, and it rejoiced him with a compensating satisfaction 
to turn its bitterness elsewhere. Furious oaths in half the 
tongues of Europe chased themselves one after another off 
the Greek’s lips. Yane let this galled and futile passion 
spend itself in its vain wrath some moments, then he spoke 
again : 

“The idea annoys you ? Well, certainly he is an incon- 
venient person to be on the list of her lovers. But what 
can you do? As for shooting him, or doing anything of 
the kind, that would create a fracas, it is not to be thought 
of. If you let him see you, all he will do will be to knock 
you down, and give you into arrest. Besides this, Idalia 
is in a great measure independent of you; over her wealth 
you have no legal control, and all moral claim to coerce 
ner you have yourself forfeited. True, you have a hold on 
her by many things; but that hold could not prevent this 
beau seigneur of the barren moors from being her lover, if 
she choose to break her vows for him, especially if she be 
quite frank with him, and let him know all. Really, on my 
honor, placed as you are through that terrible impulsive- 
ness which you never will abandon, I do not see how you 
are to step between Madame de Yassalis and this modern 
Bothwell, if they choose to play at Love for a little while 
with each other. 

And Vane softly finished his citron, having spoken the 
most stinging words he could have strung together with 
the gentle, persuasive accent of a woman coaxing her best 
friend. Phaulcon swung round and strode up to him as 


THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 


22 ) 


he had done before, his eyes glittering with fire, his fac 
darkly flashed. 

“ Perdition seize you I if you dare to make a jest o f — ” 

“Chut!” said Yane, with the suavest hush that ever fell 
from any lips. “ Caro mio, if I speak a little lightly of 
your lovely Idalia, whose fault is it? — 'is it not thine, O 
my friend V Altro! keep that style for men who have not 
worn the badge of silver ivy with you at an opera ball. 
As regards this affair — he is certainly in love with her ; she 
possibly encourages it. Unlikely, I know, but still — I 
repeat — possible. He is an excessively fine man 1 There- 
fore, since you cannot appear in the matter, owing to va- 
rious little intricacies, what steps will you take ? It is a 
delicate question, cher Conrad ; the Countess Idalia is not 
a woman to brook open interference : — even with your title 
to give it. She is very proud ! I am wholly with you, 
and I am not inclined to be very simpatico to that Arab- 
looking courier; but you must really be cautious how you 
touch him ; that matter would look very ugly if it turned 
up against you. The idea of firing at him at all ! — and 
then of not hitting him when you did fire! Will you not 
believe me how very mistaken all impulsiveness is?” 

Phaulcon writhed under the negligent, gently-uttered 
phrases; all the pent p'assion in him was tenfold hotter 
and darker, because it was in so great a measure power- 
less ; but he was blinded to all that Victor chose him to be 
blind to — namely, his own love for her of whom they spoke 
— and he dreamed of nothing in his words beyond their 
mutual antagonism for the man they had mutually injured. 
An hour went by before they parted ; left alone, the mas- 
ter of the dainty palazetto overhanging the Neapolitan 
waves neither peeled a citron, nor toyed lightly with this 
thought of Erceldoune’s presence in Capri. On the con- 
trary, admirably though he had veiled them, passions fiercer 
than the Greek’s had lightened in him with the intelligence : 
the delicate colorlessness of his face flushed with a faint 
hot hue, his blue smiling eyes gleamed like steel, he set his 
teeth with a snarl like a greyhound’s. 

“She loves him, or she will love him; — how soft her 
eyes grew for him in the East ! There is no assassinating 
him — only fools kill. There is no challenging him — that 


222 


ID ALTA. 


is long out of date, and, besides, he is as good a shot as 
any of us, or better. There is no ruining him — his fortunes 
are ruined already, and she is too world- wise to attempt 
any lies to her with a chance of success. If she choose to 
allow his love, who can prevent that ? — Conrad cannot ex- 
ert his title while the Moldavian affair hangs over his head. 
There is only one chance ; — if he be such a fool as to take 
his passion seriously, if he be ignorant of her history, and 
give her headlong faith. But that is such a hazard ! — he 
is in love with her beauty, what would he care though one 
proved to him that she were vile as Messalina? Ah, 
Idalia ! bellissima Idalia ! you are haughty as a queen, and 
beautiful as a goddess, and dangerous as a velvet-voiced 
cardinal, and brightly keen as the wisest statesman, but ” 

And while these thoughts strayed through his mind, he 
thrust the knife he held up to its haft in a pomegranate 
among the citrons; and while the red juice welled out, 
and the purple pulp seemed to shrink as though wounded, 
he plunged the blade, down and down, again and again, 
into the heart of the fruit, as though the action were a re- 
lief to him, as though the stab to the pomegranate were an 
allegory. 

Yet with it a nobler feeling, a melancholy that was for 
the moment too deep to be able to replace regret by re- 
taliation, came on him. 

“ She could have made me what she would !” he thought. 
“I could have won a throne for her. Greece swings in 
the air for any bold hand to seize ; a turn of the wheel, and 
Hungary may be thrown in the lottery; free Yenetia, and 
she would give the scepter to her deliverer. Such things 
have been; they will be again. Valerian was a common 
soldier, Themistocles was a bastard, Bonaparte an artillery 
officer — what has been may be again. They were once far 
farther off power than I. For myself, I could do all that 
is possible — with her, I would do the impossible P 1 

A smile crossed his face at the dreaming wildness of his 
own thoughts; his profound acumen could never so wholly 
desert him that he could be the prey to any emotion with- 
out some sense of ridicule and disdain even for himself; 
but there was more of pain at his heart than of self-con- 
tempt; he felt, even amid the jealous bitterness that was 


THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 


223 


turning his love into hatred, that he should have become a 
better and a truer man had Idalia returned his passion. 

“ I dream like a boy, or a madman !” he thought, while 
his hand crushed with a fierce gesture an odorous crown of 
orange-flowers, and flung the bruised petals out to the sea. 
“And yet, — with her, — I could have had force in me to 
make even such dreams real. If she had loved me, I would 
have slaved for her, dared for her, conquered for her. If 
she had loved me, there is nothing I would not have com- 
passed.” 

Even where he stood in solitude, his lips quivered and 
his forehead contracted, as under some unbearable physical 
pain ; hardly thirty years were over his head, all the ma- 
turity of life lay before him ; he felt that he had the genius 
in him to rule men and to carve himself a memory in his- 
tory; he had the ability that would have made him a su- 
preme and triumphant statesman ; he would have been this, 
he would not have failed to be it, had opportunity been his. 
As it was, he saw the portals of fame closed to him through 
the disadvantages of position, and the exercise of power 
denied to him because he had not the primary power of 
money. Impatient and bitter at his exile from legitimate 
fields he had thrown himself into bastard politics; and ad- 
ventured his fate with the secret and uncertain gambling 
of intrigue and conspiracy. 

He hated Austria, and would have schemed night and 
day to humble her ; beyond this feeling he had as little 
unison as might be with his associates ; for the grandeur 
of theoretic republicanism, for the regeneration of Italy, 
for the freedom of Hungary or Poland, for the advance of 
the high-flown quixotism of Garibaldians, or for such po- 
etic partisanship as breathed in “ Casa Guidi Windows,” 
he had never a single throb of sympathy. But he loved 
the power that it seemed to him he might obtain through 
them ; he loved the machinations that in their work he 
wove so wisely and so well; he foresaw what had not then 
come, the certain downfall of the Neapolitan Bourbons ; 
he had the spirit of the gamester, and \vas happiest in the 
recklessness of chance ; he had the ambition of a states- 
man, and he aspired, in the revival of nationalities and in 
the turmoil of new liberties, to seize the moment to advance 


224 


IDALIA. 


himself to the prominence and the predominance which he 
coveted. Therefore he had embraced a party with which 
his temper had little akin, whose v ; ews his own mind dis- 
dained as chimerical, and whose cause only his thwarted am- 
bitions induced him to embrace. As yet, though he held a 
great power in his hands over the lives of men whose pro- 
jects and whose aspirations were all confided to his mercy, 
no substantial power had accrued to him ; he had reaped 
but little, he had risked much, and his accumulated debts 
were very heavy. As he saw himself now, — although in 
general, when in the full excitement of his life, the full com- 
plexity of its intrigues, he thought otherwise, — he saw the 
truth : that in the flower of his manhood he was without 
a career, without a future ; that with all his talents, graces, 
and fashion, he was no more than an adventurer; that 
bankruptcy, pecuniary and social, might any hour fall on 
him ; that — stripped of the brilliance of his elegant world, 
and of the euphuisms of a political profession — he was 
neither more nor less in literal fact than a gamester, a spy, 
and a beggared speculator in the great hazards of Euro- 
pean destinies. In such a mood he hated himself, he hated 
all he was allied with, he hated the world that he had the 
genius aud the tact to rule, yet in which he absolutely 
owned not even a sum enough to save him from hopeless 
ruin whenever the fate that hung over him should fall. 
And a greater bitterness than even this came on him : for 
once he loved ; for once he felt that greater, better, truer 
things might have been possible for him; for once a pang, 
almost as sharp as agony, seized him in dreaming of what 
he might have been. 

For once he suffered. 

Every disdainful word, every contemptuous glance, every 
cold rebuke, of the woman he coveted with the passion of 
ambition, as well as with the passion of love, seemed burned 
into his memory and perpetually before him. He could 
not even make her believe that he loved her ! — that was 
the deadliest pang of all. Hate, cruel, fierce, remorseless, 
the most insatiate hate of all, the hate which springs from 
baffled love, wound its way into his thoughts agaiu. Be- 
fore now, he had been a cold tactician, an unscrupulous 
intriguer, a man who cared nothing at what cost his ends 


THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 


225 


were gained, but still one who, from innate gentleness of 
temper and instinctive refinement of nature, had felt no 
sort of temptation toward grosser and darker evil ; had, 
indeed, ridiculed it as the clumsy weapon of the ignorant 
and the fool; now he was in that mood when the heart of 
the man possessed by it cries thirstily, “Evil, be thou my 
good.” 

“ I have all their cards in my hands,” he thought, where 
he leaned, musingly flinging the buds of the gum-cistus 
into the water below. “A word from me — and her haughty 
head would lie on the stone floor of a dungeon.” 

The thought grew on him, strangely changing the char- 
acter of his features as it worked out its serpent’s undula- 
tions through his mind. His clear and sunny eyes grew 
cruel ; his delicate lips hardened into a straight acrid line ; 
his smooth brow darkened and contracted; this man, who 
had had before but the subtle, graceful swoop, the bright, 
unerring keenness of the falcon, now stooped lower, and had 
the merciless craft, the lust to devour and to destroy, of 
the fox. 

He drew out of his pocket a letter in a miniature Italian 
hand ; such a hand as a Machiavelli, a John de Medici, 
or an Acquaviva, might have written. He read it slowly, 
weighing every line, then put it back into its resting-place, 
with a certain disdain and sneer upon his face: — there was 
not the brain in Europe, he thought, that could outwit his. 

“Austria will bid higher than that,” he mused, “ and the 
young wretch here will fall as Bourbons always fell. Six 
months, and he will be driven out of Naples — it would be 
much to be his ‘ Count d’Avalto 1 and his ‘ Lord Chamber- 
lain 'then! Fools! do they think such a bribe as that 
would take? If 1 make terms, it shall be with the Haps- 
burgh; they shall pay me in proportion to my hate. They 
know what my enmity has meant !” 

He leaned musingly over the marble parapet of his ter- 
race, the lines of cruelty and of craft sinking deeper into 
his fair, unworn face; even to him, free from all such weak- 
nesses as an unprofitable honor, and not unwilling to sell 
his hate, as he would have sold his intellect for power, 
even to him there was something bitter and shameful in the 
thought of treason — something that made him recoil from 
P 


226 


IDALIA. 


the desertior. of those who had been allied to him so long, 
and acceptance of those who had so long had his deepest 
hatred; something that made the very silence of the Ital- 
ian noon, the very melody of the Italian seas, the very ca- 
dence of a boat-song, that echoed dreamily over the waves 
from a distance, that only let its closing cadence, “ Liberta! 
O Liberta 1” come upon his ear, seem like a reproach to 
him by whom she — this Italy in chains, this Italy ruined 
through her own fatal dower of a too great beauty — was 
about to be betrayed. 

There never yet was the man so hardened that he could 
play the part, and take the wage of an Iscariot, without 
this pang. 

“ She does it,” he said, in his teeth, with a sophism that 
ere now he would have disdained. “ She might have made 
me what she would ; she chooses to make me ” 

“A traitor,” 1 was not uttered even clearly in his thoughts; 
who thinks out clearly such thoughts as these to the last 
iota of their own damnable meaning ? A shiver, too, ran 
through him as he recalled a risk that even his fertile state- 
craft could not avail to ward off from him, the step he 
meditated once being taken ; — the risk of the stab-thrust 
in the back from the poinard of the “ Brotherhood,” which 
even in this day, even in the streets of polished European 
capitals, strikes soon or late, howsoever high they stand in 
a traitor’s guilty purples, those who have broken the oath 
of those secret bonds. 

Then he laughed; a smile in which the last instinct of 
his better nature died. 

“ Faugh ! my good Italians shall believe that I join the 
White Coats to serve Yenetia: my blind Viennese shall 
think I wear a fair face to Italy to entrap her confi- 
dence for them. It is so easy to dupe both. And she — 
Naples will suffice for that. A whisper of mine to Mon- 
signore Giulio, and scorn, and wit, and statesmanship, and 
wealth, and all the cozenries of her loveliness, all the re- 
sources of her art, will avail her nothing. There, in 
the Yicaria, what will she do with her beauty, and her 
kingdom, and her lovers, and the insolence of her pride, 
\hen ? Better have shared a crown with me 1” 

As his thoughts shaped themselves into ruthless shape 


“MONSIQNORE.” 227 

that dulled remorse, and stole swiftly and surely on the evil 
path which tempted him, the whole man in him changed: 
the gentleness of his nature grew into fierce lust, the un- 
scrupulous subtlety of his intellect was merged into a 
deadly thirst for retaliation. On the woman who had scorn- 
fully repelled him he could have dealt a hundred deaths. 

Yet for one moment more the love he had borne her 
vanquished him again, and he remembered nothing but its 
pain, its wrong, and its rejection ; for one moment more 
he gave himself up to the misery, the weakness, the shame, 
as he held it, of this fool’s idolatry; — it was the one thing 
alone, loathingly as he contemned it, that could have made 
him a better and a truer man. 

His head dropped till it sank down on to his arms, that 
were folded on the marble ledge, and a sharp quiver like a 
woman’s weeping shook him from head to foot. 

“I would have forgiven her all — even her scorn,” he 
thought, “if only she would have believed that I loved 
her 1” 


CHAPTER XYI. 

“ MONSIQNORE.” 

In one of the fairest nooks of the Bay of Naples stood 
a palace in the perfection of taste, from the frescoes on its 
walls within to the delicate harebeil-like campanile, that 
threw its slim shaft aloft, looking toward Amalfi. Fronting 
the sea, a small oval- shaped pier ran out into the water, 
with a broad flight of steps terminating it ; above this, the 
natural growth of the country had hung a self-woven screen 
of orange and myrtle boughs; a place of embarkation, or 
disembarkation, lonely, secure, and unlooked on by any- 
thing save by lofty Anacapri far above, hanging like an 
eagle’s nest among the clouds. In the shadow of the even- 
ing a boat stopped there, a man alighted, dismissed the 
rowers, and went on along the length of the little quay to 


22S 


ID ALIA. 


an arched door of carious cinque-cento work ; it was the 
private entrance of the palazelto, which, despite the hu- 
mility of the diminutive it was given, stretched up and 
around in wing on wing in stately architecture, and num- 
bered ninety chambers. 

He was admitted, and entered the house, lighted with a 
flood of light, crowded with a glittering suite of attendants 
of all grades, and seemingly endless in its vastness with 
chamber and corridor, opening out one on another in 
wearying succession of splendor, relieved from monotony, 
however, by the exquisite pieces of sculpture and of paint- 
ing that studded the whole like a second Pitti. Some 
thirty of these corridors and reception-rooms ended in a 
little chamber, small at least by comparison, hung with 
purple velvet, its furniture of silver and of ebony, its only 
painting a superb Ecce Homo of Leonardo’s, its windows 
narrow and lancet-suaped, the whole now illumined with a 
soft amber light ; — this was the sanctuary of Monsignore 
Villaflor. 

Monsignore rose with affability — he was ever affable — 
and advanced with courtly grace. Monsignore was a hand- 
some and portly man, with the beautiful Neapolitan eyes 
and the beautiful Neapolitan face ; a little losing the sym- 
metry of his figure now, and over his fiftieth year, but a 
very noble person still. He wore the violet robes of a 
bishop, and on his hand sparkled the bishop’s amethyst 
ring. Looking at him, it was hard to beiieve that the 
race of prince-bishops had died out, for he was a very 
princely person. He was not like St. Philip Neri, he was 
not like Reginald de la Pole, he was not like Acacius, or 
Franfois Xavier, or the great martyred man who looked 
across to England with those sublime words — “ Terram 
Anglicse video, et favente Domino terram intrabo, sciens 
tamen eertissime quod mihi immineat passio” — and kept 
his oath, and went. Monsignore was not like any of these; 
but he was excessively like Cardinal Bembo, he was exces- 
sively like Cardinal Mazarin. 

Victor Vane bowed before him with the grace of a 
courtier and the reverence of a son of the Church ; with 
the Paris literati he was a Cartesian, with the Germans a 
Spinozian, with the English men of science a Rationalist, 


sr MONSIGNORE. ” 220 

a Pantheist, a Monotheist, or a Darwinian, with the 
Mountain an Atheist, as best suited; but with the Mon- 
signori he was always deferential to the Faith. They met 
as those who have often met for the advancement of mutual 
aims, but they met also as those who have to play a deli- 
cate game with each other, in which the cards must be stu- 
diously concealed. Both were perfect diplomatists. The 
game opened gracefully, courteously, cautiously, with a little 
trifling on either side; but they approached their respective 
points in it more quickly, less warily, than usual, for he who 
before had but played into the hands of Monsignore to be- 
tray him, now came to play into his hands with sincerity. 

This was not the first by many audiences the brilliant 
Bishop, the favorite of the Vatican, had given to one who 
had been until the night before this the deadliest foe of his 
Church, of his king, of his projects, of his policies; for 
Giulio Villaflor had been duped despite all his finesses, and 
had believed the gentle and adroit Englishman his tool, 
while he was, in truth, the tool himself. Monsignore had 
his silken webs over Italy, and France, and Austria, and 
Spain; Monsignore had his secret sbirri of the ablest; 
Monsignore knew everything ; was the lover of great 
ladies who played the spy in palaces, never gave a Bene- 
dicite without some diplomatic touch, never administered 
the Viaticum but what the Church was the richer for a 
legacy, never yet was compromised by a lie, yet never yet 
was driven to the vulgarity of the truth ; — but even Mon- 
signore had been trepanned by Victor Vane. The secret 
of the defeat was this: Giulio Villaflor loved power well, 
but he loved other things as well ; the pleasures of the 
table, the scent of pure wines, and the gleam of almond 
eyes and snowy bosoms. His opponent had loved nothing 
but power; until now, for the first time, he loved a woman 
and loved a revenge. Hence, now for the first time, also, 
he played into Villaflor’s hands. 

A dusky red tinged the pale clear brown cheek of the 
Bishop, and in his eyes was the gleam that those who knew 
him had learned to tremble sorely at when too few were 
found for the dungeons of the Vicaria, or out of the crowds 
of Easter-day one face dared look a frank defiance at him 
while the Silver Trumpets sounded. 

20 


230 


IDALIA. 


“All the revolutionists have not menaced ns and braved 
ns as this one woman has done ! ” he muttered. “All the 
rebels of Sardinia and Sicily have not the danger in them 
that Idalia has. The man is bad enough, but she ” 

“Conrad can be bought,” put in Yane, gently; there 
was, indeed, an overstrained quietude in his face and in 
his tone. “ Name the price your Grace will give ; I will 
purchase him for you to-morrow.” 

Monsignore bent his head with a slight smile. 

“ Promise what you will, I can confide perfectly in your 
discretion 1” he said, with hi3 suave dignity of grace ; he 
reserved to himself the right to refuse ratification of the 
promises when the fish should be fairly baited and hooked. 
“He is but a secondary matter — can she be bought ?” 

“No!” Into the calm immutability of her betrayer’s 
voice there glided a half sullen, half bitter, yet withal 
admiring savageness ; he was recalling to memory the im- 
perial disdain with which she had swept from him the night 
before, the indifference with which she had disregarded 
alike his entreaties and his threats. “ What could be 
offered her that could eclipse what she has ? She has 
wealth — she has dominion — she has a power wider than 
yours !” 

The last words were almost bluntly, uttered ; for the 
moment he felt a thrill of triumph in flinging the splendor 
and the influence of the woman by whom he had been re- 
jected in the teeth of even the purples and the pomps of 
Eternal Rome. 

The dusky red glowed slightly brighter in Monsignore’s 
cheek, a flush of anger ; he waved his delicate white hand 
with an expressive action. 

“ While they last ! But if she had choice between re- 
taining these — under our pleasure — and losing them — say 
in the casemates of the Capuano yonder ; what then, my 
son ? She would yield ?” 

“ She would never yield.” 

He answered calmly, still with that restrained and im- 
passive serenity on him ; by the tone, lie said as though 
he had spoken it that no menace, no pang, no death, would 
make Idalia what he was now — a renegade. 

“Altro! she is a woman ?” said Monsignore, with the 


MONSIGNORE. 


231 


c * 


mockery of the Neapolitan laugh in the protrusion of his 
handsome under lip. 

“We waste words, Monsignore, ” said Victor Vane, 
abruptly. “ She is not like other women.” 

“ Contumacious ! Then she must feel the arm of the 
Church.” The words were spoken without any ruffle of 
that silken and unctuous tone in which Giulio Villaflor 
whispered softest trifles in the ear of Austrian and Parisian 
beauty, but in the lustrous eyes gleamed a glance cold as 
ice, fierce as lust, dangerous as steel. “ My son, tell us all 
that you know once more.” 

“All that I know !” There was a smile that flickered 
across his features one moment, though it passed too in- 
stantaneously for it to be even caught by Villaflor. “That 
would take hours. I can give you heads, and bring you 
proofs as you require them. I know that she arranged the 
escape of the two Ronaldeschi from the galleys. I know 
that she has effected the flight of Carradino from his 
prison ; I know that through her twenty thousand muskets 
will find their way to Poland, and the same into Tuscany, 
by routes that all your sbirri will never discover ; I know 
that it was at her salons in Paris that the war of Sicily 
was first organized ; I know that she is the life, the soul, 
the core, the prophetess of every national movement. I 
know that she holds the threads of every insurrectionary 
movement from the Apennines to the Caucasus ” 

Monsignore made a slight gesture of impatience ; wfflile 
shading his eyes with the hand on which the episcopal 
amethyst glittered, he narrowly watched the immutable 
countenance of his companion. 

“ We know all these, and much more,” he said, with an 
accent of disappointed irritation. “ If we can once secure 
her person, we have witness enough against her to consign 
her twenty times over to the peine forte et dure , to the 
prison, or the convent cell, for her lifetime. Idalia 1 — she 
is Satanas ! — you have more to tell than these stories, fig - 
lio mio ?” 

“ Or I would not have wearied your Grace to-night,” 
assented Vane, still with that calm and undeviating air as 
of one who, having learnt a recitation by heart, mechani- 


232 


ID ALIA. 


cally, yet unwaveringly, repeats it out. 11 Yes, I know 
more ; I know that she is — here.” 

“ Here /” 

Despite the perfect self-command and the trained ira- 
movability of the courtly Churchman, surprise and exulta- 
tion for once escaped him, uncontrolled aud unconcealed ; 
his eyes lightened, his hand grasped the ivory and ebon 
elbow of his state chair, his Kps moved rapidly. 

“ Here ! She has the daring of a Caesar !” 

And there was in the words an accent of compelled ad- 
miration that was, perhaps, from such a foe as this great 
Priest of Rome, the highest homage that Idalia had ever 
yet extorted ; for it was homage wrung out in unwilling 
veneration from the hatred and the cunning of an implaca- 
ble antagonist. 

Yane started, as though stung, and turned his face 
toward the grand dark canvas of the Ecce Homo, away 
from the fall of the light. When the astute Churchman, 
who had been his own hated enemy and duped tool so 
long, and whom he now used as the weapon of his ven- 
geance — when the haughty Catholic, who pursued her 
with the rancor of his creed, and with the unpardoning 
bitterness of a mighty and unscrupulous priesthood 
against those who dare to defy and to disdain it — when, 
from the unwilling admiration of Giulio Yillaflor, this 
tribute was wrung to the lofty and unconquerable courage 
of the woman whom he had come hitherto betray into the 
unsparing hands of her foes, he — the traitor — felt for one 
moment sunk into depths of shame, felt for one moment 
the full depravity and vileness of that abyss into which 
thwarted ambition and covetous revenge had drawn him. 

Yet if he would have repented and retracted, he could 
not; and would not have done so if he could. The word 
was spoken ; he had delivered her over into the power of 
her adversaries, had delivered over her beautiful neck to 
the brand, her proud head to the cord, her wealth to the 
coffers of the Bourbon, her loveliness to the mercy of 
Rome, her life to the hell of the Dungeon. It was done ; 
aud still as he turned to the dark shadow of the Leonardo 
with that loathing of the light which murderers feel when 
every ray that touches them seems to them as though 


MONSIGNORE. 


233 


it 




seeking out their crime, he would not have undone it if he 
could. For he had loved her, and now hated her with a 
great insatiate hate ; so near these passions lie together. 

u Here !” echoed Villailor once more, while his large 
eyes lighted with the fire of the tiger, though that fire 
was subdued under the droop of his velvet lashes. “ In 
Naples ! And 1 not to know it ?” 

In that single sentence was told a terrible reckoning 
that waited for those of his people — of his spies — who 
had been thus treacherous, or for the carelessness which 
had withheld from him the near presence of the woman 
whom he had watched, waited, plotted, bribed, schemed to 
entrap with all the intricacies and resources of his astute 
intellect and far-spread meshes, for so long. 

“ In Capri — and without disguise, ” answered Yane, 
turning his head from a seemingly negligent glance at the 
Leonardo ; his eyes were quite clear, his countenance 
quite frank, his smile gentle and delicately satirical as 
usual. He was now attuned to his part again, and the 
evil in him gaining the sole mastery upon him, made him 
take a Borgian pleasure in thus preparing drop on drop, 
with the precision and the genius of science, the poison 
that was to consume and wither the brilliant life of the 
woman he had vainly loved. “ Remember ! first, she is 
unaware that you know all your Grace could alone have 
known through me — she is unaware that there are any 
proofs against her in the possession of the Neapolitan 
Court ; secondly, she is one to whom the meaning of fear 
and submission is unknown ; she claims the Greek blood 
of Artemesia — she has Artemesian daring ; thirdly, she 
has so attached the Marinari to her, that, good subjects 
and brainless beasts though these Capriotes be, she could 
scarce be touched on their shore with impunity ; fourthly 
and chiefly, so many swords would leap out of their scab- 
bards for Idalia, despite the many dead men who have, 
dying, cursed her, so world-wide and so well known is the 
dominion of her beauty, that I believe she thinks that 
none of the governments dare touch her. She relies on 
this : that Sicily is in revolt, Naples in ferment ; one pub- 
lic act, such as these poor, blind, contumacious mules call 
tyranny, done to a woman whose loveliness could excite 

20 * 


234 


ID ALIA. 


the populace, and whose genius could command it like 
Idalia’s, and the crisis which is, as even you confess, often 
bo near, might come, despite you and the Palace, with a 
thunder you could not still by the thunder of the Vatican, 
Holy Father.” 

There was a bitter irony hidden under the gentle court- 
liness of the words, and of the apologetic softness of the 
smile with which they were uttered. He had been a foe 
and a traitor to Giulio Villaflor so long, that he could not 
at once abandon the refined pleasure of thrusting silken 
taunts against that silken Churchman. The words lashed 
the passions of the Neapolitan as was purposed ; that 
dusky scarlet glow came again into his cheek, his nostrils 
dilated, his fine lips quivered haughtily ; for the instant 
he lost the unctuousness of the Palace Priest, and had the 
grand arrogance of a Wolsey, a Richelieu, or a Granvella. 

He moved as though to rise from his ivory chair — as 
though to go into the van of combat for the Church and 
for the Nobles, like the warrior bishops of the past. 

“ Do you think I fear the people! — a beast that 
crouches to the whip, and kicks the fallen ; that cringes 
when its paunch is empty, and bullies when it is bold with 
a full feed ! I fear the people ! By the Mother of God, 
I would teach them such obedience that they should never 
breathe, but by my will !” 

For the moment there flashed out the old spirit of the 
Colonna and the Este in the unusual outbreak of proud 
passion ; arrogant, cruel, and iron though the words were, 
Giulio Villaflor, as he spoke them, was a grander and a 
better man, because a truer and a bolder, than in the vel- 
vet sweetness, the courtly maskings of his palatial sancti- 
ties, of his episcopal voluptuousness, of his blending of 
courtier, statesman, saint, and roue. He who heard 
smiled that delicate smile that meant a malice and an 
irony so infinite, yet never betrayed this unless it were de- 
sired to be betrayed. 

“ Then,” he asked, softly, “you would dare arrest her in 
Capri ?” 

The eyes of Monsignore flashed upon him. 

“ Dare is not a word to use to Rome !” 

It was the haughty defiance and self deification of the 


MONSIGNORE. 


235 


u 


1J 


Pontifical Power roused, as it had roused of old against 
Emperors and Kings, rebels in the Cloisters and rebels in 
the Courts, against the scepter of Barbarossa as against 
the science of Abelard, of the Power which refuses to see 
that this day is not as that, which denies that the dawn 
has shone because its fiat has gone forth for darkness to 
endure. 

“ Your Grace cannot think that I used the word save 
as suggestive of what is expedient. Your object is to 
make the Countess Vassalis a political prisoner. Is it ad- 
visable to allow her the halo of political martyrdom ? 
Do you wish to give the enemies of the Church and King 
the power to compare you to a second Cyril, and her to 
a second Hypatia V 1 

Giulio Villaflor smiled a very expressive, a very devil- 
ish smile, mellow though it was. 

“No. I have no desire to deify another Greek cour- 
tesan.” 

Was the word as foul slander to the living Athenian as 
it was to the dead Alexandrian ? 

His smile was answered in his listener’s eyes ; in that 
instant Victor almost forgave him the animosities of 
lengthened years, in that instant almost loved him and ad- 
mired him ; their natures were so kindred, they could stab 
so well with the same weapon. 

“ Precisely 1” he said, with that persuasive tact which, 
save once, under the contempt of Idalia, had never de- 
serted him. “ Then pardon me, Monsignore ; but will it 
not be well to conduct this matter with as little publicity 
as may be ? Where there is danger for her, there will she 
remain ; I know what she is. She has all the finesse of a 
Greek, but she has none of a Greek’s cowardice. More- 
over, it is to secure Viana that she is here (we will come 
to his affair afterward) ; he is all but gained to her, and 
he is rash and reckless to foolhardiness. At his villa of 
Antina, in the interior, there is, the day after to-morrow, 
a reunion of the ‘Alpe al Alar’ confederates, and, under 
cover of a masquerade, its political purpose has been kept 
strictly secret. Had even you not known of it through 
me, you would never have heard of it in any other light 
than as one of Carlo’s splendid eccentricities and extrava- 


23G 


ID ALIA. 


gant entertainments. There is a password which, also, 
but through me, your Grace’s choicest experts would not 
have been able to surprise. Ah, Monsignore, there is 
mine under mine ; government spies are too often content 
to believe that when they have explored the topmost one 
they know all ! There, at Antina, will be the Countess 
Yassalis, and not she alone; CafTradali, Aldino, Yillari, 
Laideschi, all the Neapolitans who are written in your 
Livre Rouge will meet. You may strike a great stroke 
at one blow; by day-dawn Yiana and his glittering mask- 
ers may fill the Castel Capuano, if you will. Ask for 
what proofs against them you choose, you can have suffi- 
cient to justify the galleys for life against one and all of 
them ; out of their own words shall you convict them, and, 
once yours, how shall this lawless Empress, this queenly 
Democrat, this patrician with the Marseillaise on her lips, 
this liberator with the pride of all the Empires in her 
heart, ever escape again to mine your thrones with her 
arts, to sap your creeds with her ironies, to arm your ene- 
mies with her riches, to overthrow your policies with her 
genius, to dare, to mock, to scheme, to revolutionize, to 
rule — to be, in one word, Idalia ? Where will her power 
be when the same^fetters as Poerio's hang on her wrists, 
where her loveliness when day and night the skies alone 
look on it from a chink in a dungeon wall, where her tri- 
umphs and her victories when the felon’s branding-iron 
eats its hot road into her breast ? She will be dead — as 
dead as in her grave.” 

The persuasive eloquence with which nature had en- 
dowed him left his tongue with a silken stealing sound, 
like the gliding movement of some serpentine thing, made 
more ornate in its eloquence by the richness of the Italian 
words he used. But there was beneath it the hiss of hatred, 
the ravenous thirst of desired vengeance, the lust that 
painted to itself her doom, and gloated on its own pictures 
with a hellish pleasure. 

Giulio Yillaflor caught that accent, and thought, with 
his acute trained wisdom : 

“ He has loved her — he will be true to us, then. There 
is no hate so sure-footed and so relentless as that hate.” 

“ Ftglio mio .” he said, with his mellowest smile, resting 


MONSIGNORE. 


237 


tt 


r> 


his glance so cruel yet so caressing on the man who hence- 
forward would be no longer his master, but his instrument, 
once having let him glean his secret, “you should have 
been in our Church ; you have an orator’s powers. How 
many souls you would have won !” 

“Pardon me, your Eminence 1 it is more amusing work, 
more to my taste at least — to lose them.” 

Monsighore smiled a gentle reproof. 

“ ‘Your Eminence !’ You give me too high a title, my 
son.” 

“Forgive me a mistake the world will soon ratify! I 
only anticipate the future by a month or two.” 

Giulio Yillaflor was flattered ; courted though he was, 
ha was not above the bait to his vanity and his ambition. 
The Cardinal’s hat was the goal of his daring yet wary 
desires, and in his own mind he foresaw himself soon or 
late a second Leo X ; Pontifex Maximus in all the ancient 
power of the Papal tiara. 

He let his eyes rest for a long moment on those of his 
companion ; they were the deep, soft, full Italian eyes, like 
the brown, gentle, luminous eyes of the oxen of the Apen- 
nines ; they could be tender in love as those of Yenus 
Pandemos, they could be spiritual in religion as those of 
Leonardo’s John, but also, they could be impenetrable as 
those of Talleyrand, they could be piercing in meaning and 
in discovery as those of Aquaviva, when, instead of the 
smile of the lover, or the benignity of the priest, he wore 
the mask of the diplomatist and politician. 

“We understand each other, figlio mioV ’ he said, gently, 
while the violet gem of the episcopal ring glittered like the 
glance of a basilisk. 

“ We do.” 

They understood each other: and thus silently, while 
the aromatic light shone on the Yinci Passion, and with- 
out the melody of the waters beat sweet measure against 
the swaying orange-boughs, the seal was set to the unholy 
barter that betrayed a woman, and played the Iscariot to 
Liberty. 


233 


IDAL1A. 


CHAPTER XYII. 

“A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS.” 

The day on which Conrad Phaulcon left her was just in 
the mellow heat of noon, yet not oppressive where the great 
overhanging rocks with drooping masses of entwined foliage 
shut out the sun; and where in the privacy of her villa 
gardens Idalia came, leaving her prosecutor to his half tri- 
umphant and half mortified solitude. 

Alone, she sank down on the stone bench that over- 
looked the sea, while the hound Sulla was crouched at her 
feet; alone, a profound weariness and dejection broke 
down the pride which had never drooped before her foe, 
while a passionate hatred quivered over the fairness of her 
face. 

“Oh God!” she said, half aloud in the unconscious 
utterance of her thoughts, “ and I once believed in that 
man as simple women believe in their religion ! Fool — 
fool — fool ! And yet I was so young then ; how could I 
know what I worked for myself? — how could I know what 
depths of vileness were in him ?” 

The dog before her, lying like a lion at rest, with his 
muzzle down, lifted his head with a loud bay of wrath, and 
a snarling growl of menace and defiance : he heard the 
footsteps of Count Conrad passing downward on the other 
side of the villa toward the beach, and he hated him with 
all a hound’s unforgiving intensity ; once, months before, 
Phaulcon had been so incautious, in a fit of passion, as to 
strike the stately Servian monarch, and, but for Idalia, 
would have been torn in pieces for the indignity. Sulla 
had never pardoned it. 

His mistress laid her hand upon his neck, and her teeth 
set slightly, while her splendid head was lifted with a 
haughty action that followed the color of her thoughts. 

“ Let him be, Sulla. The man who is false is beneath 
rebuke or revenge !” 


“A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITI* HANDS.” 230 

And to those who should have known her rightly that 
proud contempt would have been more than any vengeance 
she could have given. She sat there many moments — . 
moments that rolled on till they grew more than hours ; 
her eyes watching the boats that passed and repassed be- 
low in the Capriote waters, her thoughts far from the scene 
around her. Her life had been changeful, varied, spent in 
many countries, and conversant with many things; its 
memories were as numerous as the sands, but what was 
written on them was not to be effaced as it could be effaced 
on the shore. The reverse of Eugenie de Guerin, who was 
“always hoping to live, and never lived,” she had lived 
only too much, only too vividly. She had had pleasure in 
it, power in it, triumph in it; but now the perfume and 
the effervescence of the wine were much evaporated, and 
there was bitterness in the cup, and a canker in the roses 
that had crowned its brim. For she was not free. 

Like the Palmyran queen she felt the fetters underneath 
the purples, and the jeweled links of gold she wore were 
symbols of captivity ; moreover, conscience had wakened 
in her, and would not sleep. 

She rose at last ; she knew many would visit her during 
the day, and she was, besides, no lover of idle dreams or 
futile regrets ; brilliant as Aspasia, and classically cultured 
as Hcloise, she was not a woman to let her hours drift on 
in inaction or in fruitless reverie ; no days were long for 
her even now that she rebelled against the tenor and the 
purpose of her life. 

With the hound beside her she left the cliff, and moved 
slowly, for the heat was at its height, backward toward her 
house; a step rapidly crushed the cyclomen, the leaves 
were swept quickly aside, and in her path stood Ercel- 
doune. The meeting was sudden to both. It was impos- 
sible that either could for the moment have any memory 
save that of the words with which they had so lately 
parted ; over the bronze of his face the blood flu-shed hotly, 
from the fairness of hers it faded ; she paused, and for the 
moment her worldly grace forsook her, she stood silent 
while he bowed before her. 

“Madame, I had your promise that you would receive 
me ; not, I hope, in vain ?” 


210 


IDALIA. 


The words were slight, were ceremonious, she had for- 
bidden him all others ; but in his voice were the feverish 
entreaty, the idolatrous slavery to her, which, repressed in 
speech, were so intense in his own heart. 

“I do not break my promises, ” she said, gently; “and 
. — and you will not do so either. Are you staying in Capri, 
that you arc here so early V 1 

His eyes looked into hers with a mute, imploring suffer- 
ing that touched her more deeply than any words could 
have done. 

“ While I have strength to keep my word, I will ; I can- 
not say my strength will endure long — you put it to a hard 
test. How hard, God only knows !” 

She stood silent a moment ; then she moved on with a 
negligent dignity. 

“ Pardon me — I put it to no test. I but told you the 
terms on which our friendship can continue. I told you, 
too, that it were better ended at once ; I say so now.” 

There was far more of melancholy than of coldness in the 
answer, chill though it might be ; one long step brought 
him to her side as she passed onward, and his voice was 
low in her ear. 

“ We said enough of that last night ! I will keep my 
word while I may ; till I break it, I claim yours. Make 
my misery if you must, but let me cheat myself out of it 
one little hour more.” 

She turned her head slightly ; and he saw that unpitying 
though her words were, her eyes were humid. 

“ If I could spare you any pain, I would ! — believe me, 
believe that at least,” she said, with an intonation that 
was almost passionate, almost appealing ; she could not 
have this man, whose life she had rescued from the grave, 
and over whose agony she had watched in the Carpathian 
solitudes, think that she could wanton with his wretched- 
ness, or be careless of his sorrow. 

“ Then — do what else you will with my life, but do not 
bid me leave you ?” 

She was silent, and she shook her head with a gesture 
of dissent ; she knew that he prepared himself but added 
pain, but more enduring suffering, the longer he deceived 
himself with the thought or the simulation of happiness. 


“A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS w 241 

Yet, she asked herself, bitterly, why was she bound to send 
him from her as though she were plague-stricken ?— why, 
since it was his will to linger in her presence, she should be 
compelled to drive him out of it ? 

Her honor, her pity, her conscience, her reason said — 
why delude him with a passing and treacherous hour of 
hope ? Her heart pleaded for him — perhaps pleaded for 
herself; — her mood changed swiftly, though her character 
never ; a natural nonchalance was combined in her with the 
dignity and depth of her nature. She was at all times too 
epicurean not to let life take its course, and heed but little 
of the morrow. 

She gave a half impatient, half weary sigh. 

“Well! be it so, if you will; for to-day, at the least,” 
she said, with the accent of one who throws thought away, 
and resigns the reins to chance. “You stay in Capri? 
Have you breakfasted ?” 

“ I thank you, yes ; in a fishing-hut on the beach 
yonder.” 

“ That must have been but a poor meal. I know what 
Capriote fare is, some smoked tunny and some dried 
onions! Come within.” 

He obeyed her, and forgot all else in the charm of that 
sweet present hour. 

She had repulsed his love ; she would have done so 
again had it' been uttered; she had told herself that this 
man’s gallant life must not be cheated into union with 
hers, this fearless heart must not be broken beneath her 
foot ; though she should have spared no other she vowed 
to spare him, over whose perils she had watched while her 
hand held the living water to his dying lips. In what she 
now did, therefore, she erred greatly; but it was very hard 
for her not to err. She was used to reign, and was ac- 
customed to follow her own pleasure, answering to none ; 
she had known the world till she was satiated with it ; she 
was in this moment utterly weary of her associates, weary 
almost of herself. There was a certain repose, a certain 
lulling peace, in the chivalrous and ennobling adoration 
she received from Erceldoune. She knew him to be a 
high-spirited gentleman, frank to a fault, loyal to rash- 
ness; with brave lion’s blood in his veins and a noble 
Q 21 


242 


IDALIA. 


knightly faith in his love ; beyond all cowardice of sus- 
picion, and true unto death to his word. It was as strange 
to her, as it was sweet, to find such a nature as this ; 
stranger and sweeter than any can know who have not 
also known life as she knew it — it was like a sweep of free, 
fresh, sea-scented Apennine air, stirred by the bold west 
wind, after the heat, the press, the bon-raots, the equivokes, 
and" the gas-glitter of a Florentine Yeglione. 

It is difficult for any who survey mankind deeply and 
widely, to retain their belief in the existence of an honest 
man ; but if they meet one, they value him far more than 
they who affect to imagine honesty as natural among men 
as beards. 

The hock, the chocolate, the fish, the fruit, were scarce 
tasted as he took them that morning : he knew nothing 
but the shaded repose of the quiet chamber, the dream-like 
enchantment of the hour, the form before him, where, 
through the green tracery of the climbing vine, the golden 
sun fell across her brow and at her feet. He was almost 
silent ; his love had a great humility, and made it seem to 
him hopeless that his hand could ever have title even to 
wander among the richness of her hair. 

To have right to win her lips to close on his, it seemed 
to him that a man should have done such great and glorious 
things as should have made his life 

A tale of high and passionate thoughts 
To their own music chanted. 

The full heat of the noon was just passed, the bells of 
afternoon vespers were sounding from a little campanile 
that rose above a jumbled mass of rock and foliage, gray 
jutting wall, and pale green olive woods; through a break 
in the foliage the precipitous road was just seen, and a 
group of weather-browned peasant women with the silver 
spadella in their hair, going upward to the chapel of S. 
Maria del Mare. Idalia rose, and followed them with her 
eyes. In an unformed wish, born of weary impatience, 
she almost envied them their mule-like round of life, their 
simple, dogged, childish faith, their nurtured indifference 
alike to pleasure and to pain. 

“ That animal life is to be envied, perhaps / 7 she said 


“a temple not made with hands.” 243 : 

rather to herself than to him. “ Their pride is centered in 
a silver hair-pin ; their conscience is committed to a priest; 
their credulity is contented with tradition ; their days are 
all the same, from the rising of one sun to another ; they 
do not love, they do not hate ; they are like the ass that 
they drive, follow one patient routine, and only take care 
for their food ; — perhaps they are to be envied 1” 

He rose also, and came beside her. 

“ Do not belie yourself! You would be the last to say 
so. You would not lose ‘ those thoughts that wander 
through eternity,’ to gain in exchange the peace from 
ignorance of the peasant or the dullard ?” 

She turned her face to him, with its most beautiful smile 
on her lips and in her eyes. 

“ No, I would not : you are right. Better to know the 
secrets of the gods, even though with pain, than to lead 
the dull, brute life, though painless. It is only in our 
dark hours that we would sell our souls for a dreamless 
ease.” 

“ Dark hours ! You should not know them. Ah, if you 
would but trust me with some confidence — if there were 
but some way in which I could serve you ” 

Her eyes met his with gratitude, even while she gave him 
a gesture of silence. She thought how little could the 
bold, straight stroke of this man’s frank chivalry cut 
through the innumerable and intricate chains that en- 
tangled her own life. The knightly Excalibur could do 
nothing to sever the filmy but insoluble meshes of secret 
intrigues. 

“It is a Saint’s day: I had forgotten it!” she said, to 
turn his words from herself, while the bell of the campanile 
still swung through the air. “I am a pagan, you see — I 
do not fancy that you care much for creeds yourself?” 

“Creeds? I wish there were no such word. It has 
only been a rallying-cry for war — an excuse for the bigot 
to burn his neighbor !” 

“ No ; long ago, under the Andes, Nezahualcoytl held the 
same faith that Socrates had vainly taught in the Agora ; and 
Zengis Khan knew the truth of theism like Plato ; yet the 
world has never generally learnt it ! It is the religion of 


244 


ID ALIA. 


nature — of reason. But the faith is too simple and too 
sublime for the multitude. The mass of minds needs a re- 
ligion of mythics, legend, symbolism, and fear. What is 
impalpable, escapes it ; and it must give an outward and 
visible shape to its belief, as it gives in its art a human 
form to its deity. Come, since we agree in our creed, I 
will take you to my temple — a temple not made by hands 1” 

She smiled on him as she spoke, and a dizzy sweetness 
filled his life. He did not ask if she had forgotten her 
words of the past night — he did not ask whether in this 
lull of dreamy joy and passionate hope there might be but 
a keener deadliness of disappointment. He was with her; 
that sufficed. She went with him out into the brightness 
of the day, down the rocky paths, under shining walls of 
glossy ilex leaves and drooping orange clusters of scented 
blossom. In the fair wild beauty of Capri, the tranquillity 
unbroken except by the lapping of the waves far down 
below and the distant echo of some sea-song, the sunlight 
that flooded land and water, the shadows sleeping lazily 
here and there where the lemon and citron-boughs were 
netted into closest luxuriance, the world seemed formed 
for love alone. 

Since she had bidden his passion die in silence, why did 
she let him linger here ? 

He did not ask ; he only gave himself to the magic of 
the present hour, to the sound of her voice as it thrilled in 
his ear, to the touch of her hair as he lifted from it some low 
hanging orange branch, to the sorcery of her presence. 

The cool sea lay, a serene world of waters, scarcely 
ruffled by a breeze, and glancing with all the marvelous 
brilliance of coloring that northern air never can know. 
The boat waited in a creek, floating there under so dark a 
6hadow from the drooping boughs of lemon and acacia, 
that it was almost in twilight : a few strokes of the oars, 
and it swept out of the brown ripples flinging up their surf 
against the rocks, into the deep blue of the sunlit bay; 
below, above, around on every side, color in all its glory, 
all its variety, all its harmony and contrast, melting into 
one paradise in the warmth of the summer day. 

“ I love the sea more dearly than any land ! It is incar- 
nate freedom !” she said, rather to herself than him, as she 


“A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS.” 245 

leant slightly over the boat, filling her hand with the water 
till its drops sparkled like the sapphires in her rings. 
There was a certain aching tone in her words that sent a 
pang to his heart: it was the envy of freedom. Was she 
not, then, free? 

“ That is the charm my own moors have — the mere sense 
of liberty they give. Barren though they be, if you were 
to see them ” 

His voice was unsteady over the last sentence. He 
thought of the dead glories of his race, of the squandered 
wealth and the fallen power that once would have been his 
by right; his to lay at her feet, his to make his fortunes 
equal with his name. 

“You love liberty ?” she said, suddenly, almost abruptly, 
save that all in her was too exquisitely harmonized, too 
full of languor and repose ever to become abrupt. “ Tell 
me, would you not think any sin justified to obtain it?” 

“ Justified ?” 

'‘Yes, justified 1” she said, impatiently, while her eye? 
flashed on him under their drooped lids. “What! do you 
know the world so well, and yet do not know that there 
have been crimes before now glorious as the morning, and 
virtues base as the selfish chillness that they sprang from ? 
What was Corday’s crime — what was Robespierre’s virtue? 
Answer me. Would you think it justified, or not?” 

A flush rose over his face quickly; he thought, he felt, 
that it was of her own liberty she spoke. 

“Do not ask me !” he said, hurriedly, passionately. 
“You would make me a sophist in your cause. Evil is 
never justified,^though done that good may come; but to 
serve you, to succor you, I fear that I should scorn no sin, 
nor turn from any !” 

The words were almost wild, but they were terribly true. 
Though perhaps the less likely thus to fall because he knew 
his own weakness, he felt that the inflexible justice, the 
honesty of purpose, the unerring loyalty to knightly creeds, 
which were so ingrained in him that they were scarce so 
much principle as instinct, might reel, and break, and be 
forgotten if once this woman whispered : 

“ Sin — and sin for me 1” 

He thought he could deny her nothing — not even his 
21 * 


246 


ID ALIA. 


sole heritage of honor — if she could bend to woo it from 
him. A look of pain passed for one moment over her 
face. She thought of him as he had lain in his extremity, 
while her hand had swept back the dark luxuriance of his 
hair, and his eyes had looked upward into hers without 
sense or sight. Was it possible that she had saved him 
then only to deal him worse hereafter ? She shook the sea- 
drops from her hand with a certain imperious impatient 
movement, and replied to him with the haughty negligence 
of her occasional manner. 

“J asked you an impersonal question — no more; and if 
you cannot frame a sophism contentedly, you are terribly 
behind your age. We have rhetoric that proves fratricide 
only a droit d’ainesse, and logic that demonstrates a lie 
the ratural right of man !” 

Fo answered her nothing. She saw a look come on his 
face mortified, wounded, incredulous. There was some- 
thing in her words, and in the accent of their utterance, 
that seemed to chill him to the bone, and freeze his very 
heart. The stately simplicity of his own character could 
not follow the manifold phases of hers. Moreover, he had 
spoken in the fervor of passion : she had answered him 
with what, if it were not half scorn, half cruelty, trenched 
close on both. 

A certain pitying light glowed in her eyes as they read 
this, the languid and ironic smile passed from her lips, she 
sighed slightly, though it was half with a laugh that she 
spoke : 

“ Caro es, non Angelus. 

Do you not remember the line in the 1 Imitatione V Be 
sure that you may say it to any human life you meet ; 
above all, to a woman’s ! There is no angel among us ; 
some faint rays of purer light here and there ; that is the 
uttermost, and that so often darkened 1 I will give you 
the surest guard against the calamity of disappointment. 
Learn to say, and realize, of all you fancy fairest or no- 
blest, this only — ‘Caro es. J ” 

He looked at her wistfully still ; the temper of the man 
had too much directness, too much singleness, to be able 
to divine the veiled meanings of her varying words, the 


“A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS.” 247 

seductive changes of her altered tones : he only knew that 
he felt for her as he had felt for no other woman. 

“Caro es ?” he repeated. “Well! — -might I not also 
be answered with its companion line, ‘Homo es, non es 
Deus V I am no sophist ; you have reproached me with 
it. Sophism is to me the shameful refuge of cowards who 
dare not own themselves criminals ; but — but— even while 
I condemned what I loved, my love would not change ; 
though she erred, I would not forsake her. ‘ Caro es V 
What knell to love is there there ? It is but to admit a 
common bond of weakness and mortality.” 

His voice was low and unsteady as he spoke, but it had 
a great sweetness in it ; the love he was forbidden to de- 
clare for her he uttered to her in them. 

She stooped and leant her hand over the side again, 
toying with the coolness of the water. His words had 
touched her keenly, and their loyalty sank deep into her 
heart. She shook her head with a slight smile — a smile 
of great sadness, of great compassion. 

“You will be still in error ! While you say the ‘Caro 
es,’ in your meaning, you will still expect more divinity 
than you will ever find on earth. It is, not that we are 
not angels — that only idiots dream — it is that we are ” 

“ What ?” 

“Worse than the worst of men too often! Hush ! we 
will talk no more. We shall soon be near my cathedral.” 

She leant back in silence, while the vessel swept with a 
free, bird like motion through the water, the boat-song of 
the Capriote rowers rising and falling with the even beat 
of their sculls, while behind them they left the rock of 
Capri, orange-crowned in the sunlight, with the soft gray 
hue of the olives melting down into the many-colored sea. 

A low and darkling arch fronted them — the porch of 
the temple, — where the broad bay lay coolest and darkest, 
and the waters deepened into deeper blue. They bowed 
their heads ; the boat shot down into the gloom, passing 
under the narrow passage-way, close and contracted as a 
cell ; then out of its darkness the skiff glided, without 
sound, into the silent and azure vault of the cathedral to 
which she brought him. 

It was the Grotto Azzuro. 


248 


IDALIA. 


The sea lay calm as a lake beneath, the blue and misty 
light poured through the silence, the Gothic aisles of rock 
rose arch upon arch in awful beauty ; there was no echo 
but of the melody of the waves chanting ever their own 
eternal hymn in a temple not built of men. It was beauti- 
ful, terrible, divine in its majesty, awful in its serenity, ap- 
palling yet godlike in its calm ; while through the stillness 
swept the ebb and flow of the sea, and all the sunless 
shadow was steeped in that deep, ethereal, unearthlike, 
azure mist which has no likeness in all the wide width of 
the world. The boat rested there, alone ; and high above 
the arched rocks rose, closing in on every side, like the 
roof of a twilight chancel, lost in vague and limitless im- 
mensity ; while through the calm there echoed only one 
grand and mournful Kyrie Eleison, — chanted by the choir 
of waves. Perfect stillness, — perfect peace, — filled only 
with that low and murmuring voice of many waters ; a 
beauty not of land, not of sea, sublime and spiritual as 
that marvelous and azure light that seemed to still and 
change all hue, all pulse of life itself; a sepulcher and yet 
a paradise ; where the world was dead, but the spirit of 
God moved on the waters. 

Passion was stilled here ; love was silenced ; the chast- 
ened solemnity, the purity of its mysterious divinity, had 
no affinity with the fevered dreams and sensuous sweetness 
of mortal desires. The warm poetic voluptuous light and 
color of the land that they had left were the associates of 
passion ; here it was hushed, and cast back in mute and 
nameless pain on its own knowledge of its own mortality ; 
here there were rather felt '‘the pain of finite hearts that 
yearn” for things dreamt of and never found ; the vague- 
ness of far-reaching futile Promethean thirst; the impulse, 
and the despair, of immortality. 

The boat paused in the midst of the still, violet, lake- 
like water. Where he lay at her feet, he looked upward 
to her through the ethereal light that floated round them, 
and seemed to sever them from earth. 

"Would to God I could die now !” 

The words broke unconsciously from him rather in the 
instinct of the moment than in conscious utterance. Her 
eyes met his, in them that dreamy and beautiful light that 


“A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS.” 24 

seemed to float in unshed tears. She laid her hand one 
moment on his forehead with a touch so soft that it was a 
caress. 

“ Hush ! — for what is worth life in us there will be no 
death 1” 

And the boat swept, slowly and noiselessly, through the 
crystal clearness of the waters, through the cold and 
solemn- loveliness, through the twilight of the blue sea- 
mists, down into the narrow darkened archway of the 
farther distance, and out once more into the golden 
splendor of the living day — even as a human life, if men’s 
dreams be true, may pass through the twilight shadows of 
earth down into the darkness of the valley of death, thence 
only to soar onward into the glory of other worlds, the 
radiance of other days. 

She stooped to him slightly as the vessel swept away 
into the breadth and brightness of the bay. 

“ Is not my temple nobler than those that are built by 
men ?” 

He looked upward at her with a look in his eyes that 
had never been there before. 

“ You have taught me to-day what I never learned in 
all the years of my life !” 

And the boat passed softly, silently, out of the sea-built 
temples that the waves had worn, out of the stillness and 
solemnity of that aerial light, onward through the heavy 
perfumes wafted from the shore, onward to where the 
Syren Isles laughed in their smiling loveliness upon the 
waters, half of earth and half of heaven. 


25 \) 


IDALIA. 


CHAPTER XTIII. 

"CRAVEST TIIOU ARCADY ? BOLD IS THY CRAVING. I SHALL 
NOT CONTENT IT.” 

The day had sunk away into evening before the boat 
returned ; the splendor of the Capri moonlight was on sea 
and land, on the gray terraces of olives, with their silvery 
plumes of foliage, and on the green vines, clustering in the 
early summer over the steep stairs of rock and the stones 
of high monastic walls. 

As they passed up the winding ascent, an old peasant 
sitting watching for the boat under the orange-boughs, a 
nut-brown, withered Capriote woman, of full seventy years, 
started from the shadow in Idalia’s path, and fell on her 
knees before her, pouring out on her gratitude and bene- 
dictions. Idalia stooped and raised her : 

“ Do not kneel to me, old friend. You owe me nothing.” 

“ I owe you my children’s life, my children’s souls!” 
cried the Italian in the patois of the bay, lifting her brown 
stern face all bathed in tears. “ To whom should I kneel, 
if not to you ? Day and night 1 prayed to S. Theresa to 
save them, and she never heard my words ; you heard them. 
The saints in glory never had more fairness than your face, 
dlustrissima ; — they never had the pity of your heart, the 
charity of your hand. They let us pray ou, pray on, and 
never speak ; you heard and saved us.” 

The one she blessed raised her once more, with a gentle 
veneration for age in the action. 

“ You have thanked me too much, madre mia ; far too 
much. The little any one of us can do to relieve sorrow 
is but such slight payment of so great a human debt. When 
Fanciulla is old enough to marry, tell her I will give her 
her silver wreath and her dower. No ! no more thanks — 
you shame me 1 You, who have led so long a life of good- 
ness, to bless rote/” 

She stooped lower still toward the old peasant, to drop 


“CRAVEST THOU ARC AD Y ?” 


251 


some gold into her kerchief unperceived, and passed on, 
while the praises and prayers of the Capriote were poured 
out, with tears staining weather-beaten, age-worn cheeks 
that in youth had never known so sweet a rain of joy and 
peace. 

“Ah !” murmured Erceldoune to her, “you cannot ask 
me now to believe you, when you say ‘ Non angelus P ” 

She turned her eyes on him with a sudden weary wist- 
fulness, a sudden ironic scorn intricately commingled: 

“I do say it. Repeat it till you believe it; it is a ter- 
rible truth. Here and there we do a little good ; — save, 
as I saved to that poor Capriote, the life of starving in- 
fants, a legacy that her dead son left to drag her into the 
grave; children as bright as the morning, dying for want 
of the bread we throw away as we eat guinea peaches and 
two thousand-franc pine-apples ! — what is the worth of it? 
It is a grain against a mountain — of evil !” 

He looked at her with appealing pain ; he felt vaguely that 
she, who to him was stainless as the morning, had the dark- 
ness of some remorse upon her, and yet he could neither 
follow the veiled intricacies of her nature, nor divest her 
of that divinity with which to-day yet more than ever he 
had clothed her. She glanced up at him and laughed. 

“ Do not look so grave ; I never murdered any one in 
poisoned wines, or medicated roses ; it is a good deal to 
say in these days of artistic slaughter 1 Believe me — a 
woman, if you rightly understand all those words say, 
you will never attribute me too much divinity, or ask me to 
oblige you with consistency. Mephistopheles always takes 
a woman’s guise now; he has found he can chauge his 
masks so much more quickly! Will you dine with me? 
Dress ? Oh ! I will pardon your costume, — it is velvet, 
picturesque, rather Spanish.” 

She motioned him to take his way into the deserted li- 
brary, and went from him down the corridors of the Villa 
Santilla, that they had reached while she spoke. 

Had she any love for him ? He had no belief that she 
could have. And yet — if there were none in her heart, was 
it not rankest cruelty to toy with him thus ? No — he could 
not reproach her that it was ; she had bidden him over and 
over again leave her, she had refused to hear words of lovo 


252 


IDALIA 


from him, she had only acceded to his remaining near her 
at his own persisting prayer ; there was no blame here. 
He had no thought that she could care in any way for his 
fate ; the caprice of her manner, the mockery of her satire, 
the profound pathos that had tinged her words, the strenu- 
ous force with which she had bidden him think evil of her — 
these were not the ways of women to one they loved ; they 
were the inconstancies of a heart ill at ease, of a spirit 
without rest and not without regret, but they were not the 
ways of a woman who loved. And yet an agony of pas- 
sion was on him ; he only felt, lived, thought, breathed, for 
her ; and the purity of the sea-temple in which he had 
looked upon her face in the past day shed on her its own 
sanctity, its own exaltation. Nothing loftier, purer, more 
superb, ever rose in a poet’s vision of idealized love than 
he had incarnated in his worship of her-^worship whose 
grandest element was faith sublime in its very blindness. 

At her villa that night there were a score of guests ; all 
men, and all unknown to him ; among them the Italian, 
Carlo of Yiana, whose subjugation to her sway had been 
so proud a triumph. Men of the world though they might 
be, there was not one of them, not even the brave, bright, 
cordial southern Prince, who could wholly conceal the sur- 
prise and the dislike, almost the offense, with which they 
saw a stranger ; their glances ranged over him curiously in 
a jealous challenge, and he felt as little amity to them. 

“ Count Phauicon is not here?” asked the Prince of 
Yiana of her. 

“ No. I regret to have to make his apologies ; he is 
unhappily prevented the honor of meeting your High- 
ness,” she answered him, as they passed into the dining- 
chamber. 

“And this foreigner; has he your pass, madame ?” 
asked Yiana, softly bending his head. 

“ He is not one of us, but he is my friend.” 

“Your friend, madame !” said Yiana, with a certain 
smile that Erceldoune caught, and for which, though he 
could hear no words accompanying it, he could have tossed 
the Tuscan prince iuto the sea sounding below the cliffs. 
“A fair title, truly : but one with which none, I think, ever 
rest content !” 


“CRAVEST THOU ARCADY V* 


253 


Viana said no more on the subject, but Erceldoune saw 
that, as in Turkey, so also in this larger gathering, his 
presence was unwelcome, and imposed a restraint on hei 
guests, though not apparently on her. He was a curb put 
on them, and they bore it with chafing impatience, deep 
ened in many of them by a jealous, surprised intolerance 
of this foreigner, with whom their hostess had entered the 
salons. 

He himself sat in almost unbroken silence, eating little, 
drinking unconsciously much more than his wont. His 
thoughts whirled ; he felt a fierce, reasonless hatred for all 
the men by whom he was surrounded. He saw her, through 
the haze of light and perfume and wine-odors and incense ; 
he felt giddy, maddened, reckless; the fiercest jealousy 
was at riot in him, and the spiritual beauty of the earlier 
day was gone for the while from him, as it was gone from 
her. 

He saw her now as she was in all the varied scenes of 
her dazzling and careless career. She took little heed of 
him, rarely addressed him, rarely looked at him ; her sil- 
ver wit, barbed and ironic, scathed all it touched ; her deli- 
cate laughter rang its mocking chime at things human and 
divine ; the diamonds on the rose hues and black laces of 
her costly dress glittered like the dews on a pomegranate. 
Her resistless coquetries enslaved whomever she would, 
and cast their golden net now on one and now on another; 
the heartlessness of a heartless code, the caprices of a 
world-wise imperious woman, used to be adored, and 
to tread the adoration at fancy beneath her foot, the reck- 
lessness of one accustomed to defy the world, and to stake 
great stakes on fortune, ruling her as utterly as a few 
hours before in the Grotto Azzuro high thoughts and 
noble regrets had reigned in her. 

Which was truly herself of those characters so dissimi- 
lar ? It would have been hard to tell. He would best 
have comprehended her who had judged — both. But to 
the man who loved her, let her be what she should, let her 
treat him as she would, the Protean changes in her tor- 
tured him as with so many masks that shrouded her beauty 
from him ; the frank singleness of his nature was without 
key to the intricate complexitv of hers. Had he seen her 
22 


ID ALIA. 


25i 

first and solely as she was to-ni/rli t — lying back in her 
chair, toying with her exotics glowing with rose and pur- 
ple, touching the golden Lebanon wine or the luscious 
Lachryraa, letting her eyes dwell with their lustrous languor 
now on one, now on another, and holding all those about 
her with a silver chain, surer than steel in its hold on 
them, ductile to her hand as silk, — he would have dreaded 
her power, he would have doubted her mercy, he would 
perhaps never have loved her. 

Erceldoune listened to the words around him, but in- 
sensibly and uncertainly; his thoughts were on her alone; 
but when they reached his senses he heard the most ad- 
vanced opinions of Europe, with the politics of the ex- 
treme Left, form the staple of all deeper discussion, and 
the basis of a thousand intricate intrigues and abortive 
projects that were circulated, often to be passed current 
with the seal of Idalia’s approbation, much more often to 
be broken in two by some hint of later intelligence than 
theirs, or some satirically suggested comment languidly let 
fall by her on their excited warmth, like the fall of an icy 
spray. And yet there were moments when she was not 
thus, when she was more seductive in her eloquent expo- 
sitions, her sudden and then impassioned earnestness, than 
in her nonchalance ; moments when she spoke low, swiftly, 
brilliantly, with a picturesque oratory, persuasive, vivid, 
irresistible, till her guests’ bold eyes glowed with admira- 
tion as they listened, and they were ready to lend them- 
selves to her hands, to be moulded like wax at her will, 
without a will of their own. Then, as often, when she 
had roused them or wooed them to the height of the en- 
thusiasm, the rashness, or the sacrifice she had sought to 
win from them, she dropped the topic as suddenly, with a 
languid indifference or a sarcastic jest, sinking back among 
her cushions, playing half wearily with the scarlet blos- 
soms of her bouquet or the velvet cars of the hound, with 
hardly a sign that she remembered the presence of her 
numerous comrades. 

'Varied and glittering though the conversation that went 
on round him was, infectious and free as its gayety of tone 
was also, marked as might seem her confidence in him to 
introduce him there, and intoxicating to every sense as the 


“CRAVEST THOU ARCADY V 1 


255 


entertainment to which she had brought him might be, 
Erceldoune was wretched in it; he could comprehend 
nothing ; he was jealous of every man at her table ; 
everything he heard related to a party, but to which he re- 
ferred, however indefinitely, his seizure in Moldavia. She 
scarcely looked at, rarely addressed him ; in nothing, save 
her personal loveliness, could he recognize the woman with 
whom he had floated through the azure air of her sea- 
temple before the sun had set. 

It was late when they rose from the table ; cards were 
begun, while the windows stood open to the midnight, 
where the southern moon flooded the Mediterranean, 
ldalia threw herself into the hazard with the eagerness of 
a gamester ; she played with the utmost recklessness, a 
hectic excitement shone in her eyes, the insouciant defi- 
ance of her wit rose with the risks of chance ; she staked 
heavy sums, lost them, and only played the more eagerly 
still. Impair her charm even this insatiate passion could 
not do, distasteful though it be in women, and even abhor- 
rent in women who are in their youth ; as seductive she 
was, but there were danger, levity, heartlessness in the 
charm. She was now at her worst. 

Once she glanced at the solitary form of Erceldoune 
standing out against the flood of moonlight; his face was 
pale and very grave, while his eyes had a pathetic won- 
der, rebuke, and pain in them ; — she never looked at him 
again. The hours went on, and the play with them ; only 
broken by intervals when hookahs and cool drinks were 
brought round, and the homage offered to hazard was 
offered to its beautiful empress. She lost very considera- 
bly for awhile, but the more she lost the more extrava- 
gantly she staked upon the cards ; and fortune changed, 
pouring in on her its successes at length as lavishly as it 
had previously squandered her gold. So the short sweet 
night passed away, over the scattered hamlets that 
crowned the piles of rocks or nestled in sea-gray olive- 
woods ; — passed away in the whirl of gambling, and the 
bitterness of jealous heart-burning, and the stir of restless 
passions. Without, where the waters lapped the shore so 
softly, and the islands hung in the starlit air like sea-birds’ 
nests brooding above the waves, the aged, dying peace- 


256 


IDALIA. 


fully, dreamt of immortality, and children slept with smiles 
upon their lips under the low brown eaves of cabin 
roofs, and the eyes of poets, wakeful and laden with volup- 
tuous thoughts, dwelt, never weary, on the silent sailing 
clouds, warm with the flush of earliest dawn ; but here, 
within, there was but the fever of unworthy things. 

Erceldoune, where he stood apart, glanced once or 
twice at that fair tranquil neglected night with an impa- 
tient sigh, as though to take relief from its balmy fresh- 
ness and cool serenity amid the glittering martyrdom of 
the scene before him and the tumult of passion at work in 
him. 

In the intensity of his pain he could have believed him- 
self like the men in the old legends whom a sorceress be- 
witched ; it was anguish alike to stay or to go ; every mo- 
ment he spent there was suffering as intense as when he 
had lain prostrate with the vultures wheeling above his 
eyes in the sickly light of the sun, yet he could not tear 
himself from its terrible fascination any more than he 
could then have torn himself from the power of the car- 
rion birds. He believed fn her ; yes, not less utterly than 
when a few hours before he had heard her lofty and spirit- 
ualized thoughts unfold all diviner things, and lead him 
through the dim and glorious mysteries of a poet’s specu- 
lations of eternal worlds. But he felt like a man in de- 
lirium tremens, who struggles with a thousand hideous and 
revolting shapes, that rise again as fast as he overthrows 
them. The atmosphere about her, the glances that dwelt 
on her, the profane mocking wit that woke her laughter, 
the eyes that met her own in such bold language, the 
gaming passion that, while it possessed at least, enslaved 
her, all these were so much desecration and profanation to 
his idol, so much blasphemy against the woman who had 
been with him in the pure stillness of the Grotto Azzuro. 
The sun above the eastward circle of bay rose, breaking 
over the sea, while the stars were still seen through its 
golden haze, in which they would, with another moment, 
die. Idalia looked at the sun, then left the gaming table. 

“ There is the day rebuking us. Good night 1” 

As she spoke she paused one moment, the full fresh 
light of the broken morning falling upon her, while. around 


“CRAVEST THOU ARC AD Y ?” 25t 

was still the wax-glare of the chandeliers ; the pure light 
lay before her, the impure glitter was behind. 

She paused one moment, looking seaward, then turned 
negligently to her guests and dismissed them, with much 
carelessness, little ceremonial. 

Yiana pursued her with eager whispered words ; she 
put him aside with a coquette’s amusement and a graceful 
gesture of denial, and passed out, while the Nubian ap- 
peared and followed her. 

The Prince, with stormy petulant anger on his face, left 
the room with his equerry. The others went out one by 
one. 

Erceldoune remained silent and motionless ; he neither 
saw nor heard what passed before him; he had bowed his 
farewell instinctively, but all that he knew were the smiles 
he had seen cast on others, and the bold look with which 
Yiana had followed her, and for which he could have 
struck him down as men of his race struck their foes when 
a back- handed sweep of a heavy iron gauntlet dashed 
down all rivalry, and washed out all insult. Each of her 
guests, as they passed out, cast a look of suppressed and 
envious dislike at him where he stood, as though he had a 
right to remain thus behind them. He noticed nothing, 
was conscious of nothing; an intolerable agony, a burn- 
ing, boundless jealousy alone were on him. He stood 
there like a man stunned, looking blankly out at the sunlit 
sweep of waters. Evil passions were not natural to him ; 
but the life he had led had left the free untamable strength 
of the old Border Chiefs unaltered in him. 

He stood there with no remembrance of how little right 
he had to remain, scarcely any remembrance even of where 
he was. All at once he started and turned. As a dog 
feels, long before human eyes can see or human ears can 
hear it, the approaching presence that he loves, so he felt 
hers before she was near him ; through the inner cham- 
bers, dark in twilight, where the lights were extinguished 
and the dawn could ill penetrate, Idalia returned. Her 
step was weary, and her face, as the illumination from the 
chandelier still burning in the window where he stood fell 
on it, was pale, even to the lips on which, as some poet 
has it, “ a sigh seemed set ” — unuttered. 

K 22* 


258 


ID ALIA. 


“ You have remained after the rest ! — how is that ? It 
is as well, though, as it is. I wish to speak to you— 
alone.” 

The words themselves might have fed many a wild hope, 
many a vain thought, in any man less single-hearted and 
less incapable of misconstruing her meaning than he was. 
With him all the light died out from his face as he heard : 
he knew that if she would have listened to his passion she 
would not have returned to him now — she would not have 
addressed him thus. 

He bowed gravely, and stood waiting for her pleasure. 
The forbearance was not lost on her. Idalia, more than 
any other woman, could appreciate this deference which 
gave her untainted comprehension, this delicacy which 
took no advantage of her return to him in solitude. She 
moved on toward one of the windows, and stood there, be- 
tween the gray light of the rising day and the radiance of 
her own card-room. 

“ You have offered me many pledges of your service,” 
she said, gravely, “ nor do I doubt their sincerity. I am 
now about to test it ; not on any ground that, as you 
think, my past slight aid to you gives me any claim upon 
your life — I have none whatever — but rather simply be- 
cause I trust you as a gallant gentleman, as a chivalrous 
nature, as a true-hearted friend.” 

He bent his head in silence ; he offered her no protesta- 
tion of his faith : he knew that none was needed. 

“ I am about to ask you much,” she resumed. “ To ask 
you to undertake a service of some danger, of immediate 
action, and of imperative secrecy ; it may involve you in 
some peril, and it can bring you no reward. Knowing 
this, are you prepared to listen to it ?” 

His face grew a shade paler beneath its warm sea- 
bronze. He divined well what her meaning was in those 
few words, “it can bring you no reward.” But he an- 
swered without a second’s hesitation. 

“Do with me what you will,” he said, simply; “I am 
ready.” 

There were no asseverations, no eager vows, no ornate 
eloquence ; but she knew better than they could tell her 
that he was hers, to send out to life or to death at her 
choice. 


“CRAVEST THOU ARC AD Y ?” 


259 


She put out her hand to him with royal grace to thank 
him as sovereigns thank their subjects. She let his lips 
linger on it mutely, then, with no more emotion than 
queens show at that act of homage, she sank into a couch, 
and bent slightly forward. 

44 Listen 1 I want no political controversy, but it seems 
to me unutterably strange that you, with your bold high 
spirit, your passion for liberty, your grand contempt for 
conventionalities and station, should have no sympathy 
with a party whose cause is essentially that of freedom ?” 

He looked at her wearily. What were creeds and causes 
to him now ? 

44 I am no politician,” he said, briefly. “ I have never 
mingled in those matters. I am neither a student nor a 
statesman. I hate tyranny. I would stamp it out wherever 
I saw it; but the codes of my race were always conserva- 
tive. I may unconsciously have imbibed them.” 

She smiled with ironic disdain. He had touched the 
qualities in her with which she could rule men like children, 
and could have swayed a kingdom with the scepter of 
Russian Catherine or of Maria Theresa. 

44 1 Conservative !’ To reverence the divinity of rust and 
of corruption — to rivet afresh the chains of tradition and 
of superstition — to bind the free limbs of living men in the 
^fetters of the past — to turn blind eyes from the light, and 
deny to thirsty lips the waters of truth — to say to the 
crowned fool, 'You are God’s elect,’ and to the poor, 
4 You are beasts of burden, only not, like other beasts, 
worthy shelter or fodder’ — to cling to falsehood, and to 
loathe reason ; — this is what it is to be ‘Conservative !’ 
Do you, who love freedom like any son of the desert, sub- 
scribe to such a creed as that ?” 

2s ow he saw her as those saw her who were subdued to 
her will, till no sense was left them save to think as she 
thought, and to do as she bade. The magic of the voice, 
the charm of the eloquence, the spell of the fearless truths, 
uttered with an imperial command, wrought on him as they 
had always done on others — as they could not fail to do on 
any man with a heart to thrill and a soul to be moved. 

“I will believe what you believe!” he cried, passion- 
ately. “You are my creed ; I have forgotten all others.” 


260 


ID ALIA. 


The brilliant fire which had been upon her face as she 
spoke, faded. 

“ Too many have made me their creed; — do you take 
some surer light to guide you. I do not seek a convert in 
you. You are happier, perhaps, if you can live thinking 
of none of these things. What I seek of you now is your 
service, not your adhesion. I want little else except your 
high courage ; and I know that will never fail either you 
or others.” 

“ Try it as you will.” 

There was a curious conflict of feelings in him as he 
heard her. He was moved to strong pleasure by the mere 
thought that she placed confidence, of whatever sort, in 
him, and he knew by her words that she held his honor, 
his faith, and his courage in full esteem ; yet as strong a 
pain smote him heavily. He felt that these great purposes 
of her life, vaguely as he could imagine them, were dearer 
to Idalia than any individual love could become, and he 
felt also that in her manner to him which seemed to place 
him farther off from her than he had ever been. 

She bowed her head in thanks to him. 

“What I need is told in few phrases,” she resumed. 
“The Conservative faction, that you favor, is in the full 
exercise of its iniquity in Naples — for a little while longer; 
a very little. There are to-night in my house — concealed 
here, I do not shirk the word — two of its greatest victims,' 
an old man and a young, father and son. The elder is as 
noble a patriot and scholar as Boethius, with no other 
crime than this ; — he wishes the freedom of his Italy. 
King Francis plays the part of Theodoric. Once arrested, 
the fate of Boethius will be his. Less severity, perhaps, 
but the galleys, at best, await his only son, fresh from the 
campaigns of Sicily. By intelligence I haye of the gov- 
ernment’s intentions, I know they will not be safe here 
three hours longer. I left my own yacht at Trieste ; be- 
sides, it could not approach Naples without being searched, 
or probably brought-to by a broadside. Yours is here ; will 
you save these men, take them secretly on board, and land 
them on the coast of Southern France? I give you my 
word that they have no other sin than one that is the 
darkest, perhaps, in the world’s sight — to love truth and 


“gravest thou arc ad y ?” 


261 


liberty too dangerously well ; — how much they have suf- 
fered for these you will know when I tell you that they are 
Filippo and Cesario Fiesoli.” 

An eager light flashed into his eyes, a noble indignation 
flushed his face; he knew the names well — the names of 
men who, for the choicest virtues of the patriot’s and 
thinker’s and soldier’s characters, had endured the worst 
persecutions of the Neapolitan Bourbons. Whatever he 
thought of creeds and causes, he loathed tyranny and op- 
pression with all his heart and soul. 

“ Save them ? Yes, if I lose my own life to do it.” 

She looked at him with a smile ; how often she had seen 
that lion spirit, that eagle daring, lighten in temperaments 
the most diverse at her bidding 1 

“Ah ! I thought your sympathies must always rise with 
liberty, and your hatred with oppression, or you would have 
belied your whole nature. I would make you 1 with us’ in 
an hour’s reasoning.” 

His eyes met hers with something pathetic in their 
wistful gaze — as though they besought her not to trifle 
with him. 

“ You never need to reason with me. You have only 
to say, ‘ I will it. ’ ” 

An absolute obedience this, an utter unquestioning sub- 
mission, prostrate as any that ever laid Marc Anthony at 
Cleopatra’s mercy, or Heloise at Abelard’s ; yet he did not 
lose his dignity in it; it was lofty even while it was sub- 
ject. it touched her, yet it pained her; it brought home 
to her tne intensity and truth of this man’s devotion ; she 
would not, or could not, return it or repay it; she had no 
right, she bethought her, with a pang, to use it as she had 
used it with so many, to the furtherance of her own aims, 
however generous or just those aims might in this in- 
stance be. Moreover, she had come to say other and more 
bitter things to him than this. 

She was silent a moment, looking at him where his gal- 
lant height rose against the clear subdued light of the 
breaking day ; her future task was more painful than she, 
consummate mistress of every toil and art, and used to 
control every mood and every passion of men, had ever 
known one yet to be. 


262 


IDALIA. 


“ Weigh the peril well,” she said, after a pause, with 
something of restraint upon her. “ It must be great — I 
mean, if you are discovered. Discovery may be guarded 
against, but it cannot be positively averted at all channels. 
If you will risk the danger of detection, your yacht can 
weigh anchor at once. She is, of course, in readiness ? 
The Fiesoli, father and son, disguised as Capriote Gsher- 
men, can row you to the vessel among others. They are 
ready to take the alarm at any instant, and sleep dressed 
in their disguises. They will probably pass in safety ; the 
Marinari here are dull and unsuspicious, nor would they 
harm what I shelter for a thousand ducats each. But, 
should detection occur, remember, the Bourbon government 
will not spare you even for your country’s sake. You will 
have rendered yourself liable to the law for assisting the 
escape of condemned ‘conspirators’ and ‘ insurgents,’ as the 
Court terras them, and you will share the fate they suffer.” 

The words were almost cold, but uttered with a visible 
effort ; in the instant, even though the urgency of peril 
for those she sought to save, and the motive for which she 
bade him expose himself to this risk at her command, ex- 
cused it to her, she loathed herself for sending him out to 
chance the slightest danger in fealty to a love that would 
never bring him anything except its pain. Indeed, his 
life was dearer to her than she, disdainful of all such weak- 
ness, yet would know. 

He raised himself erect. 

“ I have given you my word ; I am not used to weigh 
the hazards of any dangers that may accrue to me through 
keeping it.” 

She answered him nothing ; the implicit obedience this 
man was ready to render her, even to the rendering up of 
his life or liberty at her word, moved her the more deeply 
beside the bold honor and the fearless independence of his 
carriage toward men, such as now flashed out even to her 
in his reply. Once again unseen by him as she leaned her 
brow upon her hand, there came upon her face the warmth, 
and in her eyes the look, with which she had gazed upon him 
in the previous night. It passed ; she rose and stood again 
in the shadow of the myrtle-covered casement, looking 
from him out toward the sea. 


il CRA VEST THOU ARCADY ?” 


263 


u When will you be ready, then ?” 

“ I am so now. Your friends can row me on board 
when you will, and the yacht can weigh anchor with them 
at once.” 

“And you take no more thought than that of periling 
your life for strangers ?” 

“ I have never taken much thought for my life that I can 
recollect. Besides, what need is there of thought? You 
wish it.” 

He spoke only in the singleness of his fidelity, in the 
earnestness of his devotion to her ; but the most refined 
subtilty of art and purpose could not have taught him a 
better means to win his way toward the tenderness of Ida- 
lia’s nature, and an infinite tenderness there was, let her 
lovers and her foes say what they would. 

Her cheek lost the warmth it had regained, her face had 
the same sadness on it which it had worn as she had en- 
tered the chamber, the intense melancholy which now and 
then fell on her at rare intervals gathered in her eyes. She 
pitied him, she honored him ; she would willingly, at all 
cost to herself, have effaced every thought which bound 
him to her, and saved him from every pang that came to 
him through her; but she was too proud and too world- 
worn to recognize that there might be a feeling even be- 
yond this in her heart for him. Even had she recognized 
it, it would not have changed her purpose — the purpose 
which had made her let him see her as he had done through 
the past evening — the purpose to toy with him no more, 
but to put from him, now and forever, the vainness of hopes 
which could but fatally beguile, only to as fatally betray, 
him. 

She could do this as no other woman could have done ; she 
had dealt with men in all the force of their enmities, all the 
height of their follies, in their most dangerous hours as in 
their most various moods; through paths no other of her 
sex could have approached, Idalia passed unhesitating and 
with impunity, and one of the secrets of her great power 
lay in her perfect and unerring knowledge of human na- 
ture. With the first hour in which she had seen the man 
who now stood with her, she had known his character as 


264 


IDALIA. 


profoundly as she knew it now. She turned to him, and 
spoke softly, yet with a certain grave and haughty grace. 

“ I do not pretend to misunderstand you ; to do so would 
be but to imitate the mock humility of foolish women. 
You would do this thing for my sake; if done at all, it 
must be done for the pure sake of justice and compassion, 
not for mine. You gave me your promise that no other 
words like these should pass between us, and I told you if 
it were broken we could meet no longer. ” 

He looked at her bewildered; she seemed to him to toy 
with him most recklessly, it was a deadly trial to his faith 
not to believe most mercilessly also. 

“ That promise I must break, then. It is the only one 
broken in my life. My God ! why do you play with me 
so ? You know what my love is !” 

His voice sunk to a breathless fervor ; he stooped for- 
ward, his lips trembling, his eyes seeking hers with an an- 
guish of entreaty. That look almost broke down her re- 
solve ; it was so easy to soothe this man’s loyal heart with 
a smile, with a glance ; it was so hard to put an end for- 
ever to that imploring prayer. Hard to her at least, now, 
when for the first time some portion of the heavy blow 
she had so often dealt fell on her, some scorch of the fiery 
pain she had so often caused touched herself, if it were but 
by sympathy and pity. Yet she was unmoved from her 
resolve ; she was unflinching in a course once chosen, and 
she was resolute to fool him on no more with empty hope, 
to let him blind himself no longer. She wished to save 
him, as far as she could still effect this, from herself, and to 
do so she sacrificed his faith in her with a ruthless and 
unsparing hand. 

“ I do know it,” she answered him ; and her voice had 
no tremor in it, her face no warmth, her eyes dwelt on him 
with a melancholy in which no softer or weaker conscious- 
ness mingled. “And because I know it, and know its 
strength and its nobility, I will not dupe it or dupe you. 
What avail to lead you on after a mirage, to let you cheat 
yourself with fond delusions ? Better you should know 
the truth at once — that what you feel for me can only bring 
you pain ; strive against it for your manhood’s sake.” 

He staggered slightly, and bent his head like a man who 


“CRAVEST THOU ARC AD Y V 1 


2G5 


receives a sudden sickening blow ; despite the revulsion of 
the last few hours, it fell on him with the greater shock 
after the peace and beauty of the day they had passed 
together on the sea. 

She looked at him, and a shadow of his own suffering 
fell on her ; she could not strike him thus without herself 
being wounded — without a pang in her own heart. Yet 
what she had determined to do as she saw him standing 
aloof that night with the rack of wondering grief, of in- 
credulous reproach upon his face, she carried out now, cost 
her in its loss — even to her fair fame — whatever it should. 

She turned to him with a sudden impulsiveness most rare 
with her, and in her eyes something of the defiance with 
which she had fronted Conrad Phaulcon mingled with an 
infinitely softer and more mournful thing. 

“ Listen ! As you have seen me to-night, I am. That 
higher, holier light you view me through is in your own 
eyes, not in me. Ask those whom you saw with me ; they 
will tell you I am without mercy — believe them. They will 
tell you I have ruined many lives, blessed none — believe 
them. They will tell you you had better have died in the 
Carpathian woods than have fallen beneath my influence — - 
believe them. Take the worse that you can learn, and 
credit it to its uttermost. Tell yourself till you score its 
truth into your heart, that I have never been, that I shall 
never be, such as you imagine me. Your love can be 
nothing to me ; but I would save it from its worst bitter- 
ness by changing it into hate. I would not even forbid 
you to change it into scorn.” 

Her eyes were prouder than they had ever been as she 
thus bade the man, who had centered in her his purest and 
most exalted faith, give to her the shame of his disdain. 
As she spoke, with her resistless beauty touched to a yet 
nobler dignity as she uttered this attainder against her own 
life, he must have loved her less, or have believed evil 
swifter than the one who heard her now, who could have 
followed out her bidding, and stamped the warning down 
into his soul, till all love of her was dead. 

He looked at her in silence, and in the heart-stricken 
pathos of that look she saw how utterly she laid life deso- 
late for him — she felt the recoil of the living death she 

28 


266 


* IDALIA. 


dealt, as now and then the hunter feels it when he meets 
the upward dying gaze of the stag his shot has pierced. 

In that instant, while his faith was beaten down for the 
first moment under the scourges of her words, and the 
chivalrous idolatry he bore her was bent and blinded under 
the dead weight of her own self-accusation, the baser alloy 
of passion alone was on him — he was only conscious of 
that madness in which men are ready, as to yield them- 
selves to an eternity of shame and torture, 

So that this woman may be mine ! 

She saw that in him ; she knew its force, its meaning ; 
she knew that in this instant of his anguish her loveliness 
was all he felt or sought. 

“ No matter what you are,” he muttered, breathlessly, 
“ no matter what you bring me — I love you, O God ! as 
no man ever, I think, loved before. Have you no pity on 
that f Be what you will, if — if ” 

His voice sank, leaving the words unfinished ; he felt 
powerless to plead with her; he felt hopeless to touch, or 
sway, or implore her ; and also, beyond all, he could not 
even, on the acceptance of her own testimony, dethrone 
her from his stainless faith, any more than a man can at a 
word tear out from him as worthless a religion that he has 
cherished as divine through a long lifetime. 

The darkest passions had no terror for her ; she had 
known them over and over again at their worst, and had 
ruled them and ruled by them. But deepest pity was in 
her heart for him ; she sought to save him, even at all 
sacrifice to herself, and she saw that it was too late ; she 
knew, as his eyes burned down into hers, that, though they 
should part now and forever, this longing she had wakened 
would consume him to his grave. 

A woman weaker and more pliant would have yielded 
to that impulse, and have given him tenderness; to the 
pride and to the truth of Idalia’s nature to have stooped 
so far had not been possible. 

“ Love is no word for me,” she said, with calmness, un- 
derneath which a vibration of deeper feeling ran. “ I am 
weary of it ; and I have none to give. I lia^e played 
with it, bribed with it, ruled by it, bought by it, worked 


“CRAVEST THOU ARCADY ?” 26 ? 

on it, and worked through it — evilly. I cannot do that 
with you. I must give you suffering. I will not also give 
you danger. Take your promise back ; I absolve you 
from it.” 

Her eyes were turned toward the sea, and not to him, 
as she spoke ; she could not watch the misery she dealt. 
She knew as though she saw it the look that came upon 
his face — darker and deadlier than the physical anguish 
that had been upon it when she had found him dying in 
the Carpathian pass. She had stricken him strengthless ; 
she had refused his love ; she had refused even his belief 
in her, even his homage to her ; she had condemned her- 
self for the evil that she wrought, and she stood aloof 
from him, imperial, world-weary, rich in the world’s 
wealth, without a rival in the sovereignty of her beauty 
and her will. Rich himself in those accidents of power 
and possession which she owned, he might have pleaded 
still, on the ground of his wretchedness, against her fiat ; 
but in the pride of his beggared fortunes his lips were 
sealed to silence ; he could not force his love, having no 
treasure upon earth save that to give, upon the empress 
of those brilliant revels on which the dawn had lately 
broken, upon the mistress of those high ambitions which 
seemed alone to reach her heart ; upon a woman so proud, 
so peerless, so throned in every luxury and every splendor 
as this woman was. She was not haughtier in her mag- 
nificent command than he iu his ruined poverty; and in 
that moment he had not force, nor memory, nor conscious- 
ness left to him. He only suffered dumbly and blindly, 
like a dog struck cruelly by the hand he loves, the hand he 
would have died in striving to obey. 

She looked at him once — Only once — and a quick sigh 
ran through her. Had she saved him from the fangs of 
the carrion beasts and the talons of the mountain birds 
merely to deal him this ? Better, she thought, have left 
him to his fate, to perish in a nameless grave, under the 
eternal shelter of the watching pines ! Yet she did not 
yield. Without a glance or a sign she moved slowly away 
across the chamber ; — their interview was over, its work 
was done. 

His step arrested her : he moved forward with a faint 


IDALIA. 


2f>8 

slow effort, like one who staggers from the weakness of 
long illness. 

“ Send those yon spoke of to me ; I do not take my 
promise back.” 

She turned her eyes full on him with a sudden light of 
wonder, of admiration, of amaze. 

“ You would do that — nowV ) 

“ 1 have said — I will.” 

She looked at him one lingering moment longer; all 
that was great, and high, and fearless in her nature an- 
swering the royalty in his ; then she bent her head silently. 
“ I thank you. Be it so.” 

And with those words only, she left him. 


CHAPTER XIX. 

“THE LIGHT IN THE DUST LIES DEAD.” 

In a distant apartment of the villa a youth lay sleeping, 
his richly-tinted face with the black curls falling back from 
the bold brow, like one of the beautiful boys who loved, 
and laughed, and danced, and sung in one long carnival, 
from sunset to sunrise, in the glad Venice of Goldoni. 
He slept soundly, as only youth sleeps, dressed in a Ca- 
priote fishing suit ; and on his chest, as the striped shirt 
fell back from it, there were the scars of deep wounds just 
healed — no more — over the Strong fearless beatings of his 
young heart. A little distance from him sat his father, 
an old man, with the grand head of a noble of Tinto- 
retto’s or Bassano’s canvas — the head of the great medie- 
val signori who filled the porphyry palaces, and swept 
through the Piazza San Marco, in the red gold of glow- 
ing summer evenings, when the year of revel was held in 
Venice for the Foscari’s accession, and the City of the 
Waters was in her glorious reign. The elder man w T as 
not sleeping ; his eyes were on his son. He had lost 


269 


“the light in the dust lies dead.” 

three such as that sleeping boy for Italy — three trampled 
down under the tread of Austrian armies or of Pontifical 
mercenaries ; the one left was the last of his name. But 
he would have sent out a hundred more, had he had them, 
to bring back the dead grandeur to Rome, to see the 
ancient liberties revive, and the banner of the free repub- 
lic float in spring-tide air above the fresh lagoons and 
over the green- wreathed arches of his beloved Venezia. 

They had suffered much, both of them, for liberty ; but 
they were both willing to suffer more — the boy in the 
dawn of his manhood, and the elder in the weariness of 
his age. There was no sound in the chamber; food and 
wine stood near ; the shutters were closed ; through a 
small oval aperture the glowing sun in the hour of its sun- 
rise alone penetrated, flooding the floor with seven-colored 
light. From the dawn without there came a faint deli- 
cious odor of carnations, of late violets, of innumerable 
leaves. The door opened noiselessly ; through it came 
Idalia. The old man started and rose, took her hand and 
pressed it to his lips, then stood in silence. She glanced 
at the sleeping youth, lying there in so profound a rest 
with a smile on his arched full lips. 

“ Poor boy !” she said, softly ; “ it is a cruelty to waken 
him. Dreams are the mercies of life. Yet there is no 
time to be lost. You may be saved still.” 

“ What ! your friend will serve us so well as that ?” 
asked the Italian, wonderingly. “ But it is not strange ; 
the English are a bold people ; they never refuse to resist 
oppression.” 

Over Idalia’s face swept an unspoken contempt. 

“ The individual English, no ! — but the nation would 
let any freedom be strangled like a hanged dog, rather 
than risk its trade or lose a farthing.” 

“But it is a great risk for him. We have no right to 
expose him to it.” 

“ No ; we have no right,” she answered, almost bitterly. 
“ Not a shadow of right ! — still he accepts it: he does not 
heed peril. What brave man does ?” 

“ For you.” 

The words were softly added ; the old Venetian looked 
at her with a mournful fixity, an unuttered interrogation. 

23 * 


270 


IDALIA 


She turned slightly from his gaze ; she knew what was in 
his thoughts ; she knew that he reminded her of the many 
who had gone out to peril, and fallen beneath it, for her 
sake. 

“ We can waste no time, caro amico,” she said, rapidly, 
in his own liquid, caressing Venetian tongue. “The ear- 
lier you leave, the less likelihood of detection. He will 
wait for you on the shore ; you will row him to his vessel 
among others ; nothing can be simpler. You will be 
safe with him.” 

Something that was almost the weakness of tears rose 
in her eyes as she spoke ; she thought how entirely her 
trust would be preserved ; how surely, at risk of very life, 
he, whom she recompensed with cold words and bitter neg- 
lect, would redeem his promise. 

Over the browned, stern, noble face of Filippo Fiesoli 
the warmth of his lost youth stole ; a look came into his 
glance that only was not love because chastened by so 
utter a hopelessness, and purified from all touch of pas- 
sion. 

“Ah 1” he murmured, in his snow-white beard, “ I can 
give you nothing, save an exile’s gratitude and the bless- 
ing of an old man near his grave. You noblest among 
women ! — what you have risked for us !” 

Idalia’s eyes softened with a mellow wistful tenderness, 
with an unspeakable regret. 

“Ah, Fiesoli ! if all patriots w T ere pure, all liberators 
true as you are, my best friend, I would count every loss 
my highest, holiest gain 1 But there is so much dross 
amid the little gold, there are such coward villainies 
masked under freedom’s name. /, too, 'noblest among 
women !’ — 0 God, sometimes I think myself the vilest !” 

He sighed; he knew her meaning; the grand pure 
heart of the old patriot would not take on itself the false- 
hood of flattering disguise. 

“ You are noblest in much,” he said, softly ; “ something 
too pitiless, something too alluring, it may be, to the many 
who love you ; but your errors are the errors of others, 
your nobility is your own.” 

She shook her head. 

“Gentle sophisms and full of charity, but not true. 


271 


“THE light in the dust lies dead.” 

My errors are my own, woven close in my nature and my 
mind ; such nobility as you speak of — if I can claim it — . 
comes rather from the recklessness of courage, the passion 
for liberty, the hatred of tyranny, than anything better in 
me. But I am not here to speak of myself ; there is not an 
instant to be lost ; wake Cesario, poor child, and then leave 
me. We are too used to life and partings to feel this sud- 
den or strange ; but, my dear friend, my honored friend, 
peace be with you, if we never meet again.” 

She held out both her hands to him with a look on her 
face that her lovers had never seen there, so gentle, so 
softened, so full of reverent sweetness. Filippo Fiesoli 
stooped over them in silence, pressing them in his own; 
he was an old man, very near his last years, as he had 
said, but perhaps in all the homage that had been lavished 
on her, she had never had one heart more nobly and more 
purely hers than was that of the great age-worn patriot’s. 
His voice was unsteady as his farewell was spoken. 

“ Death will take me, most likely, before 1 can ever look 
upon your face again ; but my dying breath will be a 
prayer for you.” 

There was an infinite dignity, a sublime pathos, that 
were beyond all pity in the benediction ; age had set its 
barrier of ice betwixt them, and the grave alone waited 
for him, but the love wherewith he loved her was very rare 
on earth. 

Without another word he turned from her, and awoke 
his son. The young soldier sprang up alert, and ready on 
the instant: he had often wakened thus with the Sicilian 
legions. As he saw Idalia, his beautiful Titian face flushed, 
his eyelids fell shyly as a girl’s, he sank before her on one 
knee with the old grace of Venice, and touched the hem 
of her dress with his lips. She smiled at him, an indul- 
gent, gentle smile, such as she would have given a caressing 
animal. 

“ There is no time to spare in courtesies, Cesario. The 
moment is come. You are ready ?” 

The boy’s lips trembled. 

“A soldier is always ready, but — if you would rather 
iet me die near you, than send me out to exile 1” 

She passed her hand lightly, half-rebukingly, over the 
silk of his dark curls. 


272 


IDALIA. 


“ Foolish child ! you talk idly. To stay here were to 
be locked in the dungeons of the Capuano. Go with your 
father, Cesario rnio ; your first duty is to him, your second 
to Italy and to liberty.” 

The youth’s eyes gleamed with the fire of the South and 
the fire of the soldier — the fire that her words could light 
as flame lights the resinous pine-wood. 

“ My first is — to you.” 

She smiled on him; she knew the romantic adoration 
that he bore her would harm him little, might lead him far 
on noble roads. 

“ Scarcely ! — but if you think so, then obey me, Cesario. 
Give your thought, beyond all, first to your father; give 
the life that remains through all trial and all temptation 
to Italy and to freedom.” 

The boy’s earnest, impassioned gaze looked upward at 
her through a mist of tears. 

“ I will 1” he murmured, fervently — “ I will.” 

She drew her hand from him with a slight gesture of 
pain ; she had seen that gaze from so many eyes, she had 
heard that vow taken by so many voices. Eyes that were 
sightless ; voices now forever stilled. 

“ Farewell,” she said, gently, to both. 11 1 will send my 
Albanian to you — he can be trusted ; and you must go 
down alone to the shore. Give this to my friend, and he 
will know you. He will be in waiting.” 

She took from her hand one of her rings, a lapis-lazuli 
stone of ancient workmanship, and held it out to the elder 
Fiesoli ; then, without longer pause, she passed from their 
presence. The boy Cesario flung himself down on the 
couch she had just risen from, and with his head bowed on 
his arms sobbed like a woman, he was a bold and gallant 
soldier, but he was but a youth ; his father stood motionless, 
the morning sunlight, as it strayed through the oval in the 
casement, falling with a golden hue upon his grand bronzed 
brow and the white sweep of his patriarch’s beard. Dif- 
ferently they both loved her, equally they alike knew their 
love hopeless. 

Idalia passed on to her own apartments. These were 
not the first lives she had saved by many ; at personal 
cost, personal peril ; saved with courage, and daring, and 


273 


“the light in the dust lies dead.” 

fertile expedient ; but they were as nothing to her in this 
moment beside the many more that through her had been 
lost. She had not yet slept or rested for a moment, but 
she felt no sense of fatigue, no willingness to sleep. Alone, 
the proud sapphire-crowned head of the coquette, the 
lionne, the sorceress, the brow that would have borne so 
royally the Byzantine diadem of her ancestral Commeni, 
drooped wearily, yet not from physical weariness ; the flush 
upon her cheeks had faded, and her form, with its trailing 
rich-hued skirts, and jewels flashing in an eastern splen- 
dor, was in strange contrast with the melancholy of her 
attitude and of her thoughts as she stood there in solitude 
at last, with the dawning light of the young day shut out 
by draperies of falling silk, and a single Etruscan lamp 
only burning near. 

“Now he has seen me as I am,” she thought — “as I 
am 1” A smile crossed her lips, but it was a smile more 
sad than tears ; — there was in it so much hatred of her- 
self. “ It was but just to him. No cruelty from me would 
kill his love, but his own scorn may. They\ove me for my 
beauty, because I charm their sight and their senses, be- 
cause they are fools, and I know how to make them mad- 
men 1 So that a woman were lovely, they would care not 
how vile she might be 1 But he — he has the old knightly 
faith, the old gallant honor ! he gives his heart with his 
passion ; he must revere what he adores. He has seen 
me as I am to-night ; the pain was deadly to him ; yet, if 
it rend me out of his memory, he may live to be grateful 
for it.” 

The warmth of the chamber seemed stifling to her, the 
perfumed oil of the lamp oppressive ; the room itself, with 
its hangings, its cabinets, its decorations, its countless bag- 
atelles of art and wealth, of extravagance and of effemi- 
nacy, struck on her loathsomely. 

“Ah ! how like my life !” she thought, with an impetu- 
ous scorn. “ The pure day is shut out, and all that is 
heated, unreal, luxurious, meretricious, worthless, is chosen 
instead ! A diamond-studded, gas-lit, dangerous lie, in- 
stead of the sunlight of truth !” 

She pushed the heavy folds of a curtain back, and opened 
the casement beyond it ; as the villa overhung the sea, so 
s 


m 


IDALIA. 


the window jutting out overhung the rock, and gave to 
view in one grand sweep the whole bow of the bay, with 
the white mists of earliest day resting still midway between 
earth and heaven. Sound there was none, save close at 
hand the low music of a monaco’s wing, and from afar the 
swinging cadence of a chiming angelus. 

She stood silent, looking long outward through the fra- 
grant coils of orange-blossom and of climbing ivy that 
hung in their green shadow before the oval of the window, 
toward the waking world that smiled below. To her, 
whose heart had never beaten for one of those which had 
throbbed for her, there came at last some recoil of the suf- 
fering which she had so often dealt, some touch of that 
futile pain which for her and through her had been so often 
borne. She saw still, in memory, the wondering and grieved 
reproach of the eyes which had haunted her throughout all 
the past hours. 

“Do I love! — 1 !” she thought, while a laugh half 
haughty, half ironic, and yet more mournful than either, 
came on her lips. And she turned back again from the 
brightness of the day with a gesture of her old imperious 
disdain. She was too proud, too skeptical, too used to 
command, too unused to weakness, not to be loth to admit 
such yielding folly in her, not to be contemptuous of her 
own softer thoughts and tenderer impulses. Love ! — to 
her it was a fool’s paradise, a gay and glittering masquer- 
ade, a scepter with which to sway a court of madmen, a 
weapon with which to reap the harvests of gold and power, 
a passion that men got drunk with as with raki, and 
through which, as they pampered or inflamed it, women 
could indirectly rule the world. Her contempt for it had 
been as great as the sovereignty with which she had used it. 

It was bitter to her to think that she could have so much 
weakness in her — so much living still beneath all that she 
had seen, known, done, to slay it by the roots. Something 
of the warmth of passion, something of its tenderness, 
were on her; and she flung them away, she would not have 
them. The unquestioning fealty which was ready to do 
her will at all and any cost, the devotion to her which, 
without any recompense, any hope, any self-interest, ac- 
cepted the peril from which she had offered to free him, 


TIIE LIGHT IN THE DUST LIES DEAD. 


275 


it 


V 


ami with a simple grandeur claimed the right to be true to 
his word : these moved her as nothing else could have done. 
Tempests had swept over her, leaving her utterly unswayed 
by them *, the rarity which touched her as something strange 
and unfamiliar was the unselfishness of the love he bore 
her. Many had loved her as well ; none so generously. 

She could see the shore far below — down through a 
wreathing, shimmering interspace of green leaves. She 
had rescued men at far keener, closer danger than there 
was in this. She had gone to Russian mask-balls, igno- 
rant whether at any moment the hand of an Imperial officer 
might not be laid on her domino, and her fettered limbs be 
borne away without warning, through the frozen night, 
over leagues on leagues and steppes on steppes of snow, 
to the Siberian doom which awaits the defenders of Po- 
land. She had swept at a wild gallop through the purple 
gloom of the midnight Campagna with her courage only 
rising the higher, her eyes only gleaming the darker. She 
had glided in her gondola through balmy spring sunsets, 
when all Venice was wreathed and perfumed with flowers iu 
some Austrian festa , and had laughed, and coquetted, and 
stirred her fan, and listened languidly to the music, while 
hidden beneath her awning was one whom the casements 
of the Quadrilateral would inclose only to let him issue to 
his death, unless her skill could save him. She had passed 
through many hours of supreme peril, personal and for 
others, and the disquietude had not been on her that was 
on her now. 

She leaned there against the casement watching the 
beach beneath, where it stretched out along the glittering 
sea. It was still only the daybreak, but the fisher-folk 
were astir, in different groups, spreading out their nets in 
the warmth of the rising sun, or putting out in their boats 
from the shore. There was glowing color, picturesque 
movement, life, healthful, active, innocent, along the gray 
line of the sand ; she sighed half impatiently as she watched 
it. Was it good to have no thought, save of a few fish ? — * 
no fear, save of the black swoop of the mistral ? — no care 
in life, save for those striped sails, and those brown keels, 
and those sun-browned, half-naked children tumbling in 
the surf ? 


IDALIA. 


276 

No ; she did not so belie herself as to cheat her thoughts 
into the lie ; she would not have relinquished the power, 
the genius, the vitality, the knowledge of her life, for a 
thousand years of the supreme passionless calm that looks 
out from the eyes of Egyptian statues, far less for the dull 
brute routine of peasant ignorance and common joys. 

On the sands Erceldoune waited, leaning against a ledge 
of rock, with his eyes fixed absently on the waters. Even 
at the distance he was from her she could see the profound 
weariness that had altered his bold and soldier- like bear- 
ing, the hopeless melancholy that darkened his face as the 
light of the dawn fell upon it. She was not a woman to 
wish things done undone, or to know the vacillations of 
regret ; yet, in the moment, she almost wished the words 
unspoken which had been uttered by her in a sudden im- 
pulse and resolve to let him blind himself no longer. 

“ It is useless to try and save him now,” she thought ; 
“he will never forget.” 

There was something which touched her infinitely in 
that guard he kept there ; patient as the Pompeian soldier 
standing at his post, while the dark cloud of the ashes and 
the liquid torrent of lava- flame poured down, certain as he 
that no reward could come to him for his unrecompensed 
obedience, save perhaps one — death. 

The Venetians left her garden. She saw them approach, 
and address him ; she saw him start as the elder man 
handed him the ring, and, as he took it, give one upward 
glance at the eyrie of the villa where she leaned. Then he 
signed to him the sailor whom he had first spoken with on 
the night of his arrival at Capri. 

There was an instant’s terrible suspense as the Capriote 
stood curiously eyeing these two unknown sailors, whose 
presence on his shore he felt odd and unwelcome, since 
living was poor in the Picola Marina, and strangers likely 
to take a share of it were commonly roughly handled : 
then he gave good-humored assent to whatever had been 
asked of him and launched his boat into the breakers with 
the single force of his broad breast and brawny arms. He 
motioned the unknown fishermen to take the oars, with 
somewhat of a sullen grace, as though their advent still 
annoyed him ; he took the helm himself ; Erceldoune flung 


“THE LIGHT IN THE DUST LIES DEAD.” 2 

his limbs down across the benches ; the little skiff put out 
to sea. Thus far the work was done. 

As the boat left the shore he turned, rose slightly, and 
looked back at Capri ; that mute farewell, that speechless 
witness of how his promise had been redeemed, smote her 
keenly. 

She watched the movement of the boat through the 
waves, with the daybreak light upon the stripes of its 
orange awning — watched it as it receded farther and far- 
ther, the tall figure of the Capriote standing at the prow, 
in his loose white shirt and his brown brigand-like Italian 
beauty — watched it till it swept out unarrested, unob- 
served, to where the yacht rocked at anchor. 

The boat reached the vessel’s side ; a while longer, and 
the anchor weighed in the quiet of the dawn, while the 
only things that stirred on the whole width of the bay 
were a few scattered fishing-craft. She, leaning there 
against the gray of the stone, looking out through the 
wreaths of the leaves, never left her watch, never relaxed 
her gaze. She knew the tigers who slept yonder where 
Naples lay ; she knew the cannon that would boom out 
through the sunny air if the errand of the Etoile was 
dreamed of ; she knew the dungeons that yawned in the 
Yicaria for those who fled. She could not tell how much, 
how little, of the escape that she had organized was known 
to the Bourbon court ; she could not tell that the govern-, 
ment of Francis might not be only seeming to slumber, 
that it might crouch like a jungle-beast the surer to seize. 
She couid not tell, even though to no living being had a 
word been whispered of her intent ; she could not tell, 
for walls have ears where tyranny rules and priestcraft 
listens. 

Any moment while the anchor was slowly wound up- 
ward, and the rigging of the yacht swarmed with eager 
sailors, the a!arm-gun might boom from Naples, and the 
pursuit run down the schooner, boarding and swamping 
her in the midst of the smiling seas of the tranquil dawn. 

At last she moved ; her white sails filled with a fair 
wind, her helm was turned straight westward, her ensign 
of St. George fluttered in the favoring breeze. With an 
easy gliding motion, like a swan’s, she passed through the 

24 


STS 


ID ALIA. 


sunlit waters, unnoticed, unpursued. ’Against her rails 
one figure leaned motionless ; his eyes were turned toward 
the rock, hanging so far above, where the villa was sus- 
pended like a falcon’s nest; turned there always while the 
yacht passed onward, out beyond Capri, beyond Ischia, 
beyond the range of Neapolitan guns and the pursuit of 
Neapolitan ships, outward to round the snow-peaks of the 
eyrie of the Bonaparte eaglets, and to steer on toward 
the southern coast of France, in safety. 

As it receded, slowly, surely, till its sails looked no 
larger than the sea-gulls that flew past her, and the busy 
day of the young summer awoke all round the semicircle 
of the bay, then, only then, Idalia moved and left the ivy- 
sheltered casement. From the glittering stretch of the 
azure seas, as from the thoughts newly arisen in her, she 
turned, with a pang of pain, with a throe of regret, the 
bitterness of pride repelling weakness, the bitterness of 
pride warring with remorse. 


CHAPTER XX. 

“MORE GREAT IN MARTYRDOM THAN THRONED AS 

Cesar’s mate.” 

At the Prince of Yiana’s villa in the interior there was 
a masquerade ; brilliant, gorgeous, like the splendid feste 
of medieval Italy, of Venice in its Dandolo glory, when 
the galleys swept home with the rich Byzantine spoils ; of 
Florence while Isabel Orsini was in her loveliness, and the 
Capello beamed her sunny fatal smile, and even grave 
Machiavel sauntered well amused through the festive Gar- 
dens of Delight, when the Embassies of the Ten came in 
their purple pomp, or the City of Flowers laughed through 
endless mirth and music. The fete was very magnificent 
at the palace at Antina, given by lavish princely hands 
that scattered their gold right and left, and vied with the 
Grammont and the Doria brillianoe away yonder in old 


GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 


219 


Rome. That at it other masks were worn than those black 
Venetian ones of pleasure, that beneath the swell of the 
music words of menace and danger were exchanged, that 
the domino was only donned that the sword might be 
surely drawn hereafter, that under the dewy orange-boughs, 
and beside the starlit waters and on the marble stairs, and 
under the light exchange of frivolous wit, intrigues were 
woven and dark plans made perfect, — these no more dis- 
turbed the gayety and the glory of the Antina masquerade 
than such had disturbed the laughing tide of festivities in 
Venice, or the garden fetes of the Tuscans in the Cinque 
Cento. Rather they suited and enhanced it ; it was in 
Italy, and they made it but the more Italian. It was the 
dagger of Sforza glancing beneath the Arlechino spangles 
and colors of Goldoni. Whoso cannot understand this 
mingling — the laugh and the arlequinade as really joyous 
as the steel and the stroke are surely subtle — can never 
understand the Italy of the Past : perhaps not the Italy 
of the Present. 

Around one the maskers gathered with passing homage, 
around one the groups were more eager, more sedulous, 
more vivacious in their wit, more earnest in their under- 
current of political discussion than round any other ; for 
on the elegance of the azure domino was the well-known 
badge of the Silver Ivy, that rallying symbol which brought 
to her all the lovers and the vassals of Idalia. She reigued 
there, as she had reigned wherever her foot fell, since the 
day eight years before, when she had left the leafy shadows 
and the yellow corn-lands of Sparta to come out to this 
world of mystery, intrigue, romance, danger, and pleasure, 
which she had made so wholly her own. 

It has been said, “ Every woman is at heart a Bohe- 
mian. ” Idalia was one to the core, all proud and patri- 
cian though she was. The excitement and the peril of her 
life, with its vivid color and its changing chances, she 
would not have exchanged for the eternal monotony of 
the most perfect calm ; not even when she most utterly 
loathed, most utterly rebelled against the bondage which 
had entered in with the life she pursued. She was weary 
with herself often for the evil that she had done, she hated 
with an intense hatred the chains that had wound them- 


ID ALIA. 


286 

selves round her freedom-loving, liberty-craving nature ; 
but all the same, once plunged into the whirlpool of the 
dangers she directed, of the excitations she enjoyed, Idalia 
would not have laid them down and left them — left her 
scepter and her peril— without a pang bitter as that which 
tears life out, without a lingering and unbearable regret. 
It is false philosophy to say that those who have been 
once launched on a career which bears them now in 
the sunlight, now in the storm-shadow ; now high on 
laughing waves of pleasure, now low sunk down under 
black bitter waters, varying ever, yet ever full of a tem- 
pestuous delight, of a headlong risk, of an abundant luxu- 
riant glow and intensity of life, will ever willingly return 
to the dull flow of tideless and uncheckered streams. 
They may in moments of exhaustion fancy that they would 
willingly take the patience and the monotony of serene un- 
noted lives — human nature will ever at times, be it in king 
or peasant, turn from what it has to sigh for what it has 
not ; — but it is only fancy, and a passing one ; — they would 
never for a second make it a reality. 

Thus it was with Idalia now ; remorse haunted her, cap- 
tivity in a sense galled her with terrible fetters ; often she 
hated herself and hated those around her; yet once in the 
vortex of the intrigues and the ambitions which had so 
long possessed her, she forgot all else. Thus she forgot 
all save them here at the Antina masquerade. It was not 
that she was changed ; it was not that her other impulses 
were not vitally and deeply true; it was simply that the 
dominant side of her character now came into play, and 
the love of power that was in her usurped its ancient 
sway. 

Moreover, here, though she scorned and abhorred many 
of the companions and tools that the cause necessitated 
and employed, the cause itself was a pure and lofty one ; 
one for which her will could never slacken, her love never 
grow cold ; — it was the freedom and the indivisibility of 
Italy. 

This was in the hearts, often on the lips, of all those to- 
night at Antina ; amid the music, the laughter, the wit, 
the balmy air breathed over a million flowers, with the 
melodies of nightingales’ tender throats, and the flash of 


GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 


281 


fire-flies among the groves of myrtle, and in the endless 
reception-chambers, with their jasper and their onyx, their 
malachite and their porphyry, stretching onward till the 
eye was lost in the colonnades of pillars, in the flood of 
light, in the sea of color. It was a scene from the Italy 
of the Renaissance, from the Italy of the Cinque Cento, 
from the Italy of Goldoni, of Boccaccio, of Tullia d’Arra- 
gona, of Bembo, of Borgia; — but beueath it ran a vein of 
thought, a stream of revolution, a throb of daring that 
gave it also a memory of Dantesque grandeur, of Grac- 
chan aspirations, of Julian force : “One Italy for the Ital- 
ians !” vibrated through it; an echo, though a faint and 
distant one, of the ancient challenge, “ The whole earth 
for the Romans.” 

Suddenly through the glittering gayety of the masquer- 
ade, the magnificence of the princely banquet, the mirth 
of the Neapolitan revelries, an icy whisper ran ; it was 
vague, unformed ; it died half spoken upon every lip, yet 
it blanched the boldest blood ; it was but one sickening, 
shameful, accursed word — “ betrayed /” 

The music ceased, the laughs hushed, there was a 
strange instantaneous pause in all the vivacious life, filling 
the palace and the gardens with its color and its mirth ; 
there was such a lull as comes over sea and land before 
the breaking of the storm. Men looked in each other’s 
faces with a terrible dread responsive in each other’s eyes ; 
glance met glance in a mute inquiry; friend gazed at 
friend in a wild search for truth, a bitter breathless 
thought of unmeasured suspicion; there was a chill, black, 
deadly horror over all — none knew whom to trust. On 
the stillness that had succeeded the music, the laughter, 
and the festivity, sounded dully the iron tread of heavily 
armed men ; where the golden fire-flies glistened among 
the leaves, glistened instead the shine of steel ; on the ter- 
races and far down the gardens gleamed the blades of 
bayonets, the barrels of musketry; the earth seemed in a 
moment to grow alive with swarming men, and bristling 
with leveled weapons ; gendarmes filled the piazza and 
tne courts ; the soldiers of Francis were upon them. 
There was an instant’s silence so intense that the murmur 
of the bubbling fountains alone reigned in it ; then with a 

24 * 


282 


ID ALIA. 


shock like thunder the bold blood of the sons of liberty, 
growing desperate, threw them in headlong violence un- 
armed upon their foes. Little avail ; the solid line of 
steel was drawn around, with not an inch unfilled; they 
were hemmed in and caught in the toils. 

Carlo of Yiana, with his careless eyes alight like a lion’s 
in its wrath, tore down from where it hung a keen Damas- 
cus sword, placed amid a stand of curiously wrought and 
antique arms, and strode over the mosaic pavement to one 
of his guests, whose azure domino was broidered and fast- 
ened with wreaths of silver ivy. 

His voice shook as he stooped to her ear. 

“ Madame — Idalia — this is more for you than us. Fol- 
low me at once ; there is a secret passage that no living 
creature knows besides myself; I can save you — I will save 
you !” 

“ I thank you deeply. But — I shall not fly from them P 

“ My God ! Not fly ? Do you not know that if you 
are taken ” 

Her lips might be a shade whiter, but her voice had no 
hesitation as she answered him : 

“ My fate will not be worse than others ; whatever is 
theirs, I share. ” 

Carlo of Yiana drew the broad blade with a ringing 
echo from the sheath : 

“ Mother of Christ, then, we will defend you while life is 
in us 1” 

At that very moment the storm broke, the tumult be- 
gan ; the gay maskers fled in from the terraces and gar- 
dens like sheep driven wild by a wolf-dog ; the banqueters 
seized the antique weapons, the weighty candelabra, the 
bronzes, the toy daggers — all and anything that would 
crash through like iron, or be hurled like stones ; the 
double lines of steel drew closer, aud filled in every aper- 
ture, blocked every door of egress ; an officer advanced to 
the center of the great arch that spanned the entrance of 
the first reception-room, and addressed the Prince Irmself? 

“Eccellenza, in the King’s name I demand your un- 
qualified submission, and your surrender to me of all sus- 
pected persons — notably, first, of the notorious revolution' 
ist known by the title of the Countess Yassalis.” 


GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 


283 


For all answer, with a mighty oath that rang through 
all his banqueting-chambers, Viana lifted his arm, and 
whirled in a flashing arc above his head the bright blade 
of the Persian steel; — Idalia bent forward with a swift 
gesture, which caught his wrist, and arrested the saber In 
its downward course ; then, turning to the King’s officer, 
she removed her Venetian mask, and looked at him calmly. 

“ If it will spare the shedding of innocent blood, you 
know me now.” 

For one moment there was a dead silence — the hush of 
speechless surprise, of speechless admiration ; the emo- 
tion of a passionate love, of a passionate pride, in and for 
her filled the hearts of her own people with an agony of 
homage and of grief ; the soldiers of the Bourbons were 
arrested for the instant, paralyzed and confounded as they 
looked on her, fronting them with a proud serenity, a 
dauntless, tranquil contempt, with the light on her dia- 
mond-bound hair. Then, as the officer of the Palace 
troops advanced to arrest her, his soldiers drawn closer 
and firmer round the banqueting-hall, the shouts of “ Viva 
PItalia!” “ Viva la libertal” shook the walls with the roll 
of thunder ; a hundred who would have died at her feet 
to save a dog of hers from injury threw themselves round 
her as in a guard of honor ; driven to bay, the lovers of 
freedom, the haters of tyranny, were ready to perish, shot 
down like hunted beasts, rather than ever yield. Carlo of 
Viana flung himself in the van, his saber flashing above 
his head ; the gay and splendid dresses of the maskers, 
glittering in the light, seemed to heave and toss like a sea 
of color ; they circled her like gardes du corps ; their im- 
provised weapons, torn from the tables, from the cabinets, 
from the walls, whirled in the radiance that burned from 
innumerable lamps. Idalia’s eyes gleamed with such fire 
as might have been in the eyes of Artemesia when she 
bore her prow down on the Persian ; of Antonina when 
she pierced the armies of the Goths, holding watch and 
ward to sack Imperial Rome ; of Boadicea when she led 
the leeni on to the fasces and the standards of the con- 
ouering legions. She would have given herself to save 
them ; but since they, with or without her, must be 
doomed, her whole soul rose responsive to the challenge 
of danger, to the defiance of submission. 


284 


ID ALIA. 


Her glance beamed on them with a superb light ; sign 
of fear, thought of terror, there were none on her; she 
stood unmoved, the center of that tossing ocean of color, 
of steel, of floating dominoes, of leveled pistols, and 
glanced at Yiana with a glance that thrilled him like 
flame and made him drunk like wine. 

“ Right I If they must take us, let us be dead first !” 

As touchwood to the flash of fire, their blood and their 
wills answered her bidding ; with a single sweep of his 
arm Yiana felled down the commander who faced him, in a 
stroke that cleft straight through bone and brain ; it was 
the signal of a life-and-death resistance. With a yell of 
fury, the soldiers closed in ; a single voice from one unseen 
rose clear above the din. 

“Reserve your fire, cut those carrion down like straw, 
and capture her alive !” 

The voice was the voice of supreme command ; officers 
and troops alike obeyed it ; it was the mellow clarion tone 
of Giulio Yillaflor, if the Priest of Peace could be the chief 
of such an errand. Vfith bayonets fixed, in ranks three 
deep, pressing steadily through the courts and chambers, 
the soldiers of Francis bore down on the band of the 
maskers. Not a man wavered as the pointed file of steel 
pressed toward them : their masks flung aside, lest in that 
moment of supreme danger any should deem them guilty of 
the wish to hide beneath disguise, their right arms lifted, 
their brave faces set, the Revolutionists waited the ap- 
proach of the Royalists — waited till there was scarce a 
foot’s breadth between their circle and the naked blades 
leveled against them. Then, with a marvelous unison, as 
she raised her hand, they launched themselves forward, 
Yiana in their van, and the weapons with which the haste 
of extremity had armed them fell with furious strength and 
lightning speed crash down on the ranks of the soldiers. 
Strange weapons — the embossed barrels of old Florentine 
arquebuses, the butt-ends of toy ivory pistols, the bronzed 
weight of lifted statuettes, the gold-handled knives of the 
banquet-tables, the massive metal of Cellini vases, the 
arabesqued steel of medieval rapiers, anything, everything 
that could have been torn down in the moment, from the 
art-treasures round, were hurled — as stones are hurled from 


GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 


285 


a barricade, down on the advancing troops of the king 
with mighty force, with tremendous issue. The Bourbon 
legionaries reeled and wavered under that pitiless storm, 
that fell like thunder-bolts upon them ; more than one 
swayed back stone dead as the bronze or gold missile of 
some statuary or amphora felled him to the ground. For- 
bidden to fire, they hesitated dismayed before that terri- 
ble band of revelers turned to warriors, of maskers changed 
to foemen, of idle laughing wits and dancers grown desperate 
as men who fought for more than life. The Royalists re- 
coiled ; they were chiefly mercenaries of various nations ; 
they could not front the blazing glance, the tiger-swoop, 
the proud, passion-heated scorn, the fearless menace of 
Italian nobles and Italian patriots. From the gloom of 
the night without, the same clarion voice rolled, clear as a 
bell’s, merciless as a Nero’s. 

“ Cowards 1 perdition seize you. Advance and fire on 
them.” 

It was a strange battle-field ! — the beautiful ball-room 
and banqueting-halls of Antina. It was a strange battle- 
scene ! — the circle of the dominoes like a ring of many 
colors were belted round the form of Idalia like guards 
around their menaced queen ; the dead men were lying 
with their blood slowly welling out over the rich mosaics 
and the velvet carpets ; the soldiers of the Throne had 
halted in a broken line, the light that had been lit for the 
gayeties of the masquerade was shining on carnage and on 
combat ; the splendors of the palace were stretching out and 
away beyond aisle on aisle of porphyry columns, through 
circle on circle of rose- wreathed arches, while without, 
through the marble pillars of the piazza, were the silver 
silence of the night and the shadows of innumerable forms 
gathering closer and closer to seal all hope from those 
who fought for liberty. 

There was a sharp, sudden, ringing clash as the bayonets 
were withdrawn and the rifles leveled ; not one in the 
circle swerved or grew the paler; their eyes, steady but 
full of flame like a lion’s at bay, looked down the mouths 
of the musketry. Idalia stood tranquil ; and as they saw 
the serene disdain in that royal glance, the unwavering 
courage on that rich and haughty loveliness, the troops of 


236 


IDALIA. 


the king- paused involuntarily. They dared not fire on 
her. 

The voice from the gardens rang imperiously through 
the stillness. 

“ Dastards ! you shall be shot down with them. Fire V 9 

The last word was not for the halting and paralyzed 
soldiers of the front ; it reached farther, to where, unseen 
and massed in countless numbers, the picked men of 
Francis’s Guard had marched noiselessly through the op- 
posite doors of the banqueting-room, and circled the band 
of patriots in the rear with an impassable barrier, meshing 
them in one net beyond escape. They had not heard, 
they had not seen, they knew nothing of the ambuscade 
behind them, where they stood gathered around Idalia, 
facing their foes and holding them back by the menace of 
their eyes, as men hold back wild beasts, in gallant and 
dauntless chivalry, willing each one of them to lay down 
their lives that night rather than yield her up in passive 
cowardice to her foes. They never saw, they never heard 
— behind them stole the murderous tread, filling up the 
rear of the lofty hall with rank on rank of soldiers. Then 
suddenly, as the word to fire rang in its merciless command 
from the outer court, the line of rifles belched forth its 
flame ; the sullen roar of the shots echoed through the 
chamber, raking the glittering colors of the masquerade 
robes as the driving hail rakes the wheat and the flowers of a 
full corn-field. Shot down from the rear in that craven mur- 
der, they fell, the balls in their breasts or their temples — a 
fourth of them leveled low ; yet not a moan, not a cry 
escaped one of them, not a prayer for pity broke from the 
lips wet with their life- blood, not a sigh of agony escaped 
those whose nerves were rent, whose bone was shattered, 
whose lungs were pierced by that dastardly masked at- 
tack. Not a cry, not a supplication, broke even from 
Idalia, as the crash of the firing rolled over the devoted 
band that guarded her. Not for the first time did she 
look on bloodshed, nor for the first time meet the like- 
ness of her death ; but as they fell downward at her 
feet, stricken like felled trees, a mortal anguish came into 
her fearless eyes ; she stretched her arms out less with 
entreaty than command. 


GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 


287 


“ Spare them ! To save them, I will surrender.” 

u By Christ, not for ten thousand lives!” cried Carlo of 
Viana, where he stood out of the deadly press, his reeking 
sword held aloft before her. “ Surrender you ! They shall 
only take you when we all lie dead around you !” 

She grasped his arm and looked up in his face: there 
was no more of fear, no more of shrinking, than there were 
on his own ; only in her eyes a superb heroism, on her lips 
a passionate entreaty. 

“ Serve me better still, my noble friend ! Turn your 
sword here 

The tumult was at its height; emboldened by the fate 
of those shot down from the rear, the Royalists of the 
front pressed in. Wedged between two barriers, the pa- 
triots fought with mad despair, with lion courage. Where 
Viana stood, pausing one instant as she turned and made 
her prayer to him, he looked down into her eyes with an 
agony far greater than her own. He knew that death 
were sweeter far to her than the fate that would await her 
from her foes ; he knew that she had in her the courage of 
Lucretia, the force of the wife of Psetus ; but to slay with 
his own hand that perfect loveliness, to destroy with his 
own steel the pulse of that splendid and gracious life ! — he 
drooped his head with a shudder, “I cannot!” 

Scarcely had the words left his lips when the blade of a 
bayonet pierced his lungs ; he fell like a mighty cedar 
lightning-stricken, not dead, but dying fast. The roar of 
the combat, the ring of the shots, the tumult of the con- 
flict, as the betrayed were pressed between the wedge of 
the Royalist van and rear, were filling his palace-chambers 
with their riot and their anguish ; he knew no more of 
sight, or sound, or life. He only looked up with blind 
eyes, that, through their mists, vainly and solely sought for 
one; his lips parted with a murmur, “ Idalia ! — Italy!’'' 
Then, with those names his latest thought, a shiver shook 
him as the red blood streamed through all the laces and 
the silks, the violet and the silver and the jewels of his 
dress, and, with one other deep-drawn, lingering sigh — he 
died. 

She sank beside him on her knees, and her own danger 
and the conflict of the night that raged in its fiery struggle, 


283 


IDALIA. 


its mortal misery, around, died from her memory, and grew 
dull upon her sense. She only remembered the man who 
lay here at her feet — dead ; dead through the love he 
bore her, dead through the creeds she had breathed in 
him ; dead for her and by her, as though her hand had 
slain him. 

The fearless grandeur faded from her face, that had 
been there throughout all chance of her own death ; it 
grew white and cold, and fixed ; a tearless grief, a burning 
remorse, were in her eyes, which only saw that crimson 
stream of flowing blood staining the tesselated floor, and 
that brave, bold, serene face turned upward to the light of 
million lamps studding like stars the vault of the dome 
above. 

“Let them take me,” she thought, “it is just. What 
am I better than a murderess?” 

From the gloom of the outer court rang once more the 
voice of command. 

“Seize her! You can choke the dogs of rebels at your 
leisure.” 

She never heard the pitiless clarion of those clear tones ; 
she never felt the hiss of the balls past her; she never saw 
the ghastly conflict that filled the palace festive* chambers 
with its clamor and its carnage, as men armed strong with 
the weight of tyranny and law pressed down on men who 
fought for liberty, for conscience, for their land, and for 
their lives. She thought only of the dead who lay around 
her. 

Two officers of the guard, obedient, stooped and laid 
their grasp upon her; the action roused her from the uncon- 
scious stupor with which she knelt beside the lifeless limbs ; 
she shook them off and rose facing them, still with that re- 
morse in her tearless eyes, though on her face were a scorn 
and a daring which held those whom she threw off at bay 
as surely as the most desperate resistance of shot or steel. 

She glanced down the hall, under the dome of the light- 
studded ceiling that stretched over so vast an area, of all 
which had been a few brief moments before filled with 
music and mirth and the murmur of laughing voices. She 
took no heed of those who had sought to seize her, but her 
eyes gazed with an infinite yearning out on her defenders 


GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 


289 


holding that unequal life-and-death struggle between the 
closing barriers of bayonets, and her voice echoed, clear 
and eloquent, yet with a music that thrilled the hearts even 
of her enemies. 

“ My friends — my friends ! — lose no more for me. Death 
is liberty, but it cannot be mine; give me no other mur- 
dered lives to lie heavy on my own. Save yourselves by 
surrender, by flight, how you can, and think no more of me. 
The future will yet avenge us all.” 

The voice of the chief in command rang down again 
from the dusky shadows of the piazza. 

“ Soldiers 1 seize and silence her. She speaks sedition.” 

The officers, gentler than he who hounded them on to 
their work, stooped, hesitating, to her. 

“ You surrender ?” 

She looked at them with a look that for the moment 
flashed back all the proud contemptuous light upon her 
face, and lit in her deep eyes the glow of the old heroism. 

“ If the carnage cease.” 

The voice from the outer courts answered her, imperious 
and unyielding — 

“We make no terms with revolutionists and rebels.” 

“ I make no peace with tyrants and assassins.” 

Her return-defiance challenged her unseen foe with a 
calm grandeur ; she stood above the fallen dead as some 
prophetess of Israel, some goddess in the Homeric age, 
might have stood above the slain, and called down ven- 
geance. 

From the darkness of the piazza a hot and heavy oath 
broke through the clamor. 

“ Yield 1 or we will deal with you as we deal with men.” 

A smile of utter unspeakable scorn passed over her lips 
— scorn for the cowardice that could threaten her thus — 
scorn for the craven temper that could deem death so vic- 
torious a menace. 

She looked down tranquilly on the gleaming barrels of 
the rifles, and as her lover, in the far Carpathian Pass, 
had given the word for his own death-shot, so she gave 
hers now. Her eyes rested steadily on the Royalists. 

Fire 1” 

The soldiers of the King gazed at her, then dropped 
* 25 


290 


IDALIA. 


the muzzles of their muskets slowly downward and down- 
ward ; they hung their heads, and their eyes fell, while 
from one to another ran a sullen rebellious murmur, 

“ Non possiamol” 

There was an instant’s intense stillness once more ; the 
tumult ceased, the clamor died away, the uplifted steel 
sank, the iron grip relaxed ; aggressors and defenders, 
revolutionists and royalists, alike were mute and awed 
before the courage of one woman. Then, with the fury 
of a mighty oath, a fresh command was hissed in its fero- 
city from the garden gloom, where the chiefs looked on 
into the courts and chambers. 

“ Make her captive, dead or living !” 

There were ruffians in that Royal Guard, brigands of 
the Abruzzi, mountaineers of Calabria, who had imbrued 
their hands in innocent blood, aud knew no check upon 
their crimes, though they would mutter Aves for their 
black and poisonous souls like any nun before her crucifix. 
These heard but to obey. They launched themselves upon 
her ; they flung themselves through the press to seize her; 
their swords flashed naked above her head, their ravenous 
eyes fed gloatingly upon her jewels and her beauty ; their 
brutal hands stretched ruthlessly to grasp and crush the 
gold of the shining hair, the mould of the delicate limbs, 
the fairness of the transparent skin ; their gripe was on 
her shoulder, their breath was on her bosom. With the 
horror, and the grace, of outraged dignity, Idalia shook 
their hold from her, and drew herself from the loathsome 
insult of their villainous contact ; her eyes shone with the 
luster of a passionate scorn, her voice mellow, imperious, 
unshaken, rang outward to the terrace where her tyrants 
herded. 

“ I surrender ! — not to escape death, but to escape the 
pollution of your touch. n 


“THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT.” 291 


CHAPTER XXI. 

“THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT.” 

In the Neapolitan palazetto, which was the residence of 
Victor Vane, the light of the summer morning made its 
way through half-closed blinds, the odors of orange and 
myrtle were heavy to oppression on the air, the waters 
beat a. lulling measure below, at the foot of the little pier ; 
it was still, soft, indolently charming, slumberously restful 
in the noontide hush ; yet he himself — commonly so calm, 
so languid, so supreme an artist in the science of lazy 
pleasures — had no repose in it or in his own life. He was 
pacing up and down the chamber that opened on the ter- 
race with a restless .impatience, a feverish irritation with 
ail things that were about him. He drank down some 
claret fresh from the ice ; it seemed to have no coolness in 
it ; he twisted some grapes asunder, and they seemed to 
parch his mouth ; he smoked an opium-filled narghile, and 
flung the tube away with a curse ; the nicotine had lost 
its charm, and irritated where it was wont to soothe ; then 
he flung himself down on a couch, with his head dropped 
on his hands, and sat there immovable many moments, 
with a quick shudder running through his limbs, and the 
silence about him like a dead intolerable weight. For 
now that his work was done he loathed it ; now that he 
had betrayed her, he could have killed himself; now that 
he had given her over to captifity and torture, he was 
haunted, and wrung, and maddened with the thoughts that 
forever pursued him. Yet — he would not have undone it 
if he could ; he would not have foregone his revenge had 
it been in his power ; since she was denied to him, he loved 
to know that she suffered, that she had pain, and fetters, 
and shame, that she would live to wish she had listened to 
his love, and to feel the cost of having mocked him and 
repulsed him. 

She had refused him all the sweetness of passion ; ho 


292 


ID ALIA. 


would not have loosened his hand on its vengeance. Since 
she could never be his, let her lose all likeness of herself, 
and perish as she might 1 There was fierceness enough in 
him to feel that ruthlessly; there was sufficient savageness 
in him beneath the polish of the world and the serenity of 
his egotism to be eager — thirstily and brutally eager — to 
know that what was beyond his reach, what he sought 
vainly, what he desired unavailingly, would be scourged, 
and defaced, and insulted, and shut out from all place on 
the earth. And yet, though he had given her up to her 
suffering, and would not, had he owned the power now, 
have released her from one pang of it, he suffered himself 
— suffered a torture not less than that to which he had 
delivered her. He knew the doom that would be hers 
under the revenge of a Church and a State so bitterly in- 
censed against her ; he knew that the net which had in- 
closed her would never unloose to let her issue with her 
life ; he knew that if she ever came forth from the captivity 
into which he had betrayed her, it would only be when 
bondage, and stripes, and the companionship of infamy, 
and the approach of age, would leave no trace on her of 
all which she once had been ; he knew — for against them 
all his hatred had been borne and his skill arrayed — the 
full meaning of the tyrannies of Bourbon and of Rome ; 
and there were times when his passion endured agonies at 
the memory of the scourge that would cut the fairness of 
her skin, of the rough hands that would unveil her beauty, 
of the jail-ruffians who would strip the delicate raiment off 
her limbs, of the villainous glances that would gloat un- 
checked on her fallen loveliness. Mercy he had none ; 
such love as he had borne her was of the character to 
change into a relentless and envenomed hate ; but it was 
passion still, and there were times when the thought of her 
yielded up to her adversary’s will, and buried forever be- 
neath the stones of a dungeon-vault, drove his own revenge 
back into his heart, and tortured him not less than that 
revenge could her. Moreover, he had betrayed her ; he 
had sold her into the hands of her foes, and though the 
subtle art of silken treachery had long been a science in 
whose proficiency he took his highest pride, there was 
manhood and there was dignity enough in him to make his 


"THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT.” 293 

forehead burn with a red flush of shame when there rose 
in remembrance before him the haughty, radiant challenge 
of her eyes, and to make him long to know her dead in 
her youth, so that those eyes should never be turned on 
him in accusation and rebuke. 

“ Great Heaven !” he muttered in his teeth, where he 
lay with his head sunk on his arms, "if she would only 
have believed I loved her ?” 

That was the one misery which had goaded him on to 
his crime. For once in his life he had been in earnest ; for 
the sole time, from his boyhood up, an emotion genuine, 
however alloyed, had risen in him. In what he had felt 
for Idalia he had been true, with a truth he had never 
known before ; for her he would have become anything 
that she had bidden him ; to win her he would have en- 
dured and achieved all tasks she could have pointed out; 
and in the single hour in which this sincerity and this 
reality had possessed him, his own skeptical mockery had 
recoiled on him in hers ; he had been powerless to induce 
her to hear one beat save that of egotism in his heart ; he 
had been powerless to make her credit one throb of love 
or loyalty in him. That she should have rejected him he 
would have pardoned her ; that she disbelieved him was 
the iron which went so far down into his soul, and changed 
every desire in him into one cruel thirst — the thirst for his 
vengeance and for her destruction. She had contemptu- 
ously doubted the force of his love. Well ! he had said 
in his teeth that she should feel that force — feel it in the 
weight of fetters, in the burden of ignominy, in the op- 
pression of dungeon solitude — feel it till she cursed the 
day that ever she braved it and mocked at it. 

Awhile ago, and he would have laughed in the beard of 
any man who should have told him that such barbaric folly, 
such desert passions as these, could ever blind and rule 
him. Now he never resisted their sway, but let them burn 
out his strength and consume his intellect as they would. 
There were times when he shook opiates into his wines 
with a hand that recked little whether it shook too little 
or too much, and would have poured out a death-dose 
without a tremor ; times when ambition seemed worthless 
as autumn leaves, and he loathed life because life could 
25 * 


294 


IDALIA. 


never yield to him the beauty of one woman. All who 
once loved Idalia drank of a madragora that left them 
little of their natures, nothing of their wisdom. Even he 
had no antidote against it, but let it steal away his brain 
and pour its fire through his limbs till the soft courtier 
grew a brute, till the subtle politician became a fool, till 
the gentleman turned a traitor. 

A sound in one of the many chambers leading off from 
the terrace-room in which he was, roused him. He was 
still too much governed by long habit and discipline not 
to recover himself instantly. Whatever he felt was only 
given way to in loneliness ; no looker-on could see any 
change in his delicate, immutable face, in his soft calm 
smile, in his easy velvet indolence; he would have profited 
little by his long study of the world if he could not have 
held his own in finesse to the last. 

Into the apartment with little ceremony and no apology, 
Conrad Phaulcon came. His disguise was perfect. He 
was used to assume one at any hour and for any need ; and 
in the dress of a melon-seller, with his fair skin stained 
and his auburn beard dyed black, his closest friend might 
have passed him by, his sworn foe failed to challenge him. 
He neither paused to watch nor ask if his host penetrated 
the mask as he swept up toward Yane, his mobile mouth 
working, and his large brown eyes aflame. 

“ Is this true ?” 

Victor had known him before he had heard his voice, 
and was on his guard. He shrugged his shoulders where 
he leaned against the side of the vine-shadowed window. 

“You incarnate volcano; you will destroy us all some 
day ! An ostensible melon-seller forcing his way in to me 
in this fashion ! Have you ever stopped to remember what 
the household can think ?” 

“ Felix admitted me, and I gave him the pass-word. 
But, answer me, for God’s sake, what of Idalia ? ” 

“ What of her ? Why, this of her, caro, that she is the 
subject for a tragic study by that eminent artist Alonsignore 
Giulio Yillaflor, to which you will form a companion pic- 
ture if you trust to a basket of melons to pass you unno- 
ticed through Naples.” 

The words were quite cool, quite unstudied, with just 


“the devil tempted ME, AND I DID EAT.” 295 

enough of regret in their half-languid banter to keep them 
from being mockery. I'haulcon’s fine frame shook pas- 
sionately as he heard; under the olive dye his cheek grew 
ashen; he threw himself down and sobbed like a child, 
wept as if his heart would break, in uncontrolled emotion. 

His friend stood looking at him some moments in silence 
with a certain impatient disdain. This Greek, handsome 
as an Apollo, cruel at times as a Nero, and stained deep 
with many a crime, was yet as a child in the sight of the 
more controlled and astute Englishman; a child in cow- 
ardice, in impulsiveness, in caprice, in tyranny, in emotion, 
with all a child’s unguardedness, recklessness, mobility, and 
love of torture. 

“ Naturally, you regret !” he said, at last, very softly. 
“You have not even killed your goose with the golden 
eggs yourself my poor Conrad, but see bird and gold both 
stolen at a blow ! Very naturally, you regret !” 

The silken irony, the mockery of pity, stung Phaulcon 
like a shot. He started up, dashing the waves of his hair 
out of his eyes, while great drops of dew stood on his 
forehead. 

“ Can you credit me nothing better than that?” 

“ Caro mio, how can I credit you with anything better 
than caring for money ? It is the one prudential virtue 
which the world does crown !” 

The Greek’s teeth crushed his silken beard, while his 
features quivered with the vivid, uncontrolled emotion of 
his changing temperament. 

“ I am not thinking of her wealth ; I think of her — of 
my own sins to her, of her beauty, of her genius, of her 
life.” 

His voice sank in a deep sob ; he spoke but the truth 
for the moment ; he thought for the instant not of him- 
self, but of Idalia; not of his own danger, not of his own 
loss, but of her torture. He loved her in his wayward, 
tyrannous way; and for awhile the love alone remained 
with him. 

“She is in the power of Villaflor!” he said, fiercely. 
Remorse was in him, and remorse made him long to wreak 
some savage vengeance somewhere ; he would have little 
cared how or on whom. 


296 


ID ALIA. 


“ They say so. You know as much as I do. It ha3 
been a terrible blow to us; to keep quiet, and cover as 
much as we can, is all we shall be able to do. There 
was great carnage at Antina, and the arrests swept off all 
the musketry spared — among them your Countess. In- 
deed, she was doubtless the chief object of all.” 

“ Where have they taken her ?” 

He spoke in his throat. At that moment he would have 
rather had a hundred balls fired into his own breast than 
have heard this of the woman he had so pitilessly chained 
and tormented. 

“ Poverino / how can we tell? It is not the fashion of 
the court to disclose its secrets, nor of Monsignore to let 
profane eyes see where his nets are spread.” 

His voice was unmoved, and almost careless, though it 
wore a natural gravity of regret, but in his *heart he en- 
dured an agony greater than that of the man before him; 
the thought crossed him, to what fate would the Prince- 
Bishop devote a captive of the sex and the years and the 
charms of the prisoner he had betrayed to him ? 

Phaulcon’s hand clinched; the muscles of his throat 
and chest, where the loose shirt of the contadino left them 
to view, swelled to bursting. Idalia was his treasury, his 
sovereignty, his world, his scepter ; without her he was 
nothing ; of her he had made with a twisted mixture in 
him of fear and homage, of tyranny and weakness, of hate 
and love, an empress who to him alone out of all the earth 
was a slave, an enchanted wand with which he summoned 
what he would, an idol that he treated as hunters treated 
their statue of Pan when they reviled^him because they 
needed more wealth than he gave, and yet feared him 
with a strange mingling of dread, of reverence, and of 
jealous love. 

“Yillaflor ?” he repeated hoarsely. “ That Satan of 
the Church ? Better she had gone at once to her death. 
Are you sure? How can you know ?” 

Yane had let slip in a momentary incaution the name of 
his great priestly confederate ; he veiled the indiscretion 
with his finest tact. 

“ How can I doubt ?” he said, with an acrid impatience 
that passed well enough for aversion to a mutual and om- 


“THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT.” 291 

nipotent foe. “ Was Giulio Yillaflor ever absent from 
such errands as those ? Did his brain ever fail to hatch 
such plots as those by which the maskers of Anlina were 
entrapped, however little his hand might be seen, or his 
will be guessed in them ? His special hatred always bore 
down on the Countess Yassalis; there is no more doubt 
that he works beneath this, if he do not wholly originate 
and govern it, than there is doubt that the sun is shining 
out yonder.” 

Phauleou swore a mighty oath in his teeth as his lips 
shook, and his face flushed purple. 

“ If he harm her, I will find my way into his palace and 
drive a dagger down his throat, though he stand at the 
altar itself 1” 

“ Carissimo ! what would that avail, except to have you 
hanged, or disposed of in a still less humane fashion ? Be 
reasonable. Tragedy will avail nothing. If you killed 
Yillaflor, there would remain a score of monsignori to take 
his place and play his cards. The arrest of Madame de 
Yassalis is a terrible stroke for us — we could better have 
afforded to lose fifty men than to lose your irresistible Ida- 
lia ; at the same time we shall not better her, and we shall 
surely imperil ourselves and all our projects, if we go like 
men in a melodrama, slaying priests and calling on the 
gods for vengeance.” 

“ What ! You would have us staud calmly by in inac- 
tion while she may be — may be ” The w ords choked 

him ; he knew w r hat the power of Giulio Yillaflor meant to 
all, meant above all to a woman. 

“ Inaction ! What action can you suggest ?” 

The Greek was silent ; his swift thoughts swept far over 
a thousand schemes that rose only to bear with them the 
sentence of impossibility. 

“ I — as eagerly as yourself — w 7 ould be the first to try all 
things, and to risk much in the service of the Countess 
Yassalis,” pursued Yane, with* the soft, even, almost un- 
natural calm which he had held throughout his interview 
with the Roman prelate. “But, frankly, I see nothing that 
is to be done with any sort of benefit. To penetrate the 
secrets of the government will take time, and, what w r e 
have very little of, money ; to avow ourselves her parti- 


IDALIA. 


298 

sans will be only at once to share her imprisonment and be 
lodged in the casemates yonder ; to attempt a rescue re- 
quires the one thing we do not possess — knowledge of 
where she has been taken. What remains? We are as 
helpless, so far as I can see, as if their chains were already 
about our limbs. There is nothing for it — yet at least — - 
except to wait and watch.” 

Phaulcon sank down again, with his head drooped and 
his hands locked savagely one in another. 

“You are right, I dare say,” he said, bitterly; “and 
very cautious ! But — you never loved her.” 

There was not even the flicker of an emotion, not the 
faintest flush on his companion’s face ; but a smile passed 
for a second over his listener’s lips ; he had not loved her; 
he whose thwarted love had betrayed her to her fate ! The 
Greek’s utter ignorance was almost ludicrous to him. 

“Your heart and your conscience have come into sud- 
den play, Conrad mio,” he said, indolently. “ I never 
knew before that you kept such old-world weaknesses ; no 
one would have accused you of them !” 

“Weill I have been guilty enough to her!” he an- 
swered, sullenly, with a dark-red flushing his cheek ; he 
was ashamed of this better emotion, as the man he was 
with now had always made him ashamed of any purer or 
higher touch that lingered in him. 

“ It is rather late in the day to think of that !” 

“ Too late 1— my God 1” 

A terrible remorse was on him, passing, fitful, evanes- 
cent, but very ardent, very contrite, while it was in its 
first poignancy, while he thought of the ghastly doom in 
which had closed the splendid life that he had made and 
marred, the career to which he had wooed and to which 
he had enchained the youth and the power and the genius 
of Idalia — a remorse in which he suffered acutely; in 
which the uncertainty and the peril of her unknown fate 
were tortures to him ; in which he seemed very vile, very 
accursed in his own sight. 

His friend looked on impatiently; it incensed him to see 
this callous, thoughtless, tyrannous, unscrupulous Greek 
moved by her danger thus ; it made his own traitor-shame 
weigh heavier on his heart. He did not lose his self-corn- 


"the devil tempted ME, AND I DID EAT.” 290 

mand ; t>ut he spoke almost insolently, on the spur of the 
misery t bat he choked down out of sight. 

Youf beautiful Countess is too fair for the scourge 
and the cell, there is no doubt of that. I dare say she 
will nerer be condemned to them. Giulio Yillaflor has 
too good a taste for such dainty paintings to shut them in 
solitude; he will not be likely to let so rare a flower wither 
in a prison-court. Miladi Idalia has better coin to buy in- 
dulgence with than all the gold of Europe 1” 

In his own wretchedness it was a cruel relief to him to 
fling dishonor at the woman he had betrayed, and to tor- 
ment the man whose self-acusing contrition made him feel 
more sharply his own baseness. 

Conrad Phaulcon started up impetuously, with deadly 
blasphemies muttered under his breath, as he paced the 
chamber like a leopard lashed to fury. 

"You do not know Idalia,” he said, savagely. "She 
would die sooner ” 

Yane laughed a flippant, nonchalant, silvery laugh. 

" Oh, believe m^e, fair women are not so enamored of 
the ugliness of death ; and — as for the rest — she has gone 
very far for the sake of public liberty ; she will scarce 
grudge a good price for personal freedom. Not know 
Idalia? Altro! I don’t think, with all your title to her 
confidence, that you know her very thoroughly yourself. 
Perhaps she will treat with Yillaflor de couronne d cou - 
ronne. We are playing a losing game ; she will have the 
tact of her sex and go over to the stronger side. She is 
far more fit for courts than for conspiracies. She could 
make good terms, I have little doubt, and I would back 
her to match the bishop in subtlety, — I could scarcely give 
as much praise to any one else in Europe.” 

"You mean that ” 

" That she will forsake us and coalesce with the royal- 
ties. All women are rakes at heart, as Pope says, and he 
should have given an alliterative line to it, — all women are 
royalists. They may talk liberalism, but they are Opti- 
mates to the core, and adore a despot, public or private. 
Madame de Yassalis will see herself in imminent danger; 
she will barter herself and her knowledge and her power 
to buy her emancipation. Not a doubt of it. She is a 


300 


IDALIA. 


republican; she is of the advanced school ; she is 1 of us : 
— oh yes ! but she is a woman of the world, a wonderfully 
clever one, too, and she will do what is expedient, and 
never die for a chimera. ” 

He more than half believed what he said ; he saw far 
into Idalia’s character, but not far enough to fully gauge 
its depth. lie had, moreover, a natural disbelief in the 
existence of any nature proof against a bribe, or capable 
of preferring a creed to a sovereignty. The Greek looked 
at him with fiery scorn. 

“ You think that ? I tell you that, rather than play for 
one hour into the hands of King or Church, Idalia would 
suffer a hundred deaths. Her word is her bond, and 
treachery has no place with her ; she will never buy lib- 
erty by a renegade’s cowardice ” 

“ Sublimely virtuous, but — scarcely true, I fancy. Miladi 
is too world- wise to be an idealist.” 

He spoke carelessly ; but such conscience as was in him, 
and all manliness that had not been polished away by the 
plane of sophism and of expediency, were pierced to the 
quick by the words that unwittingly stung him so closely. 

“ By-the-way,” he went on carelessly, “I dare say that 
the Court, having snared her, would be willing to treat 
with you. What do you say, amico mio ? You have not 
made a very good thing of Liberalism ; would you try 
Absolutism for a time, and change the Phrygian bonnet 
for a Neapolitan coronet?” 

“//” 

“Well — you. If they do not take you prisoner too, 
you may conclude very good terms just now, in all proba- 
bility. Our party is bruised, but not killed. We have 
danger enough in us to render us worth bribing, though 
not strength enough to give us a straw’s weight of suc- 
cess. Under the circumstances, you might make a very 
lucrative bargain. There is no reason on earth why a 
democratic condittiero like you, my good Conrad, should 
not be metamorphosed into a courtier and a son of the 
Church. What do you think of it ?” 

Phaulcon’s eyes had fastened on him throughout his 
speech with a glistening light that he — he who had told 
the Prince-Bishop that he could buy this man at a mo- 


‘THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT.” 301 

merit’s notice — had construed as the eagerness for change, 
for security, and for a costly bribe, of an avaricious and 
reckless adventurer. As he ceased, the Greek’s rich voice 
broke across his final words like thunder. 

“By Heaven, if 1 thought you spoke in earnest I would 
kill you where you sit 1 If I did such villainy as you hint 
at, I should deserve the shot or the steel that would find 
its way to me as surely as night follows day. You tempt 
me to such shame — you 1” 

Victor raised his hand with a slight warning gesture ; 
the gesture that controlled his companion’s tumultuous 
passions like a spell. 

“ Why not ? — to try you ? Frankly, I scarce gave you 
credit for such sublimated idealogy and self-devotion. Do 
you mean to say that you would rather swing or be shot 
by the Bourbons to-morrow than get a court place and an 
Italian title ?” 

He spoke with a contemptuous, incredulous insolence ; 
he would as soon have expected Vesuvius to vomit gold 
and diamonds as to find anything like loyalty and probity 
in the man he dealt with — a man who checked at no crime, 
and knew no contrition. 

The Greek flushed restlessly and painfully under the 
brown dye of his skin. 

“ Sneer as you will,” he said, sullenly, “ I have so much 
conscience in me, whether you believe it or not. 1 am 
vile enough, I dare say, but I am not so vile as that . 
There are few sins 1 have not plunged into, there is not 
one that I fear ; but a renegade I never was yet, and never 
will be. By Heavens ! if I felt myself turning traitor, if 
I thought that my strength would fail me to keep true, I 
would set the mouth of a pistol against my own head be- 
fore my lips had time to dishonor me !” 

In the moment he was true; in the moment the one 
higher thing in his nature asserted its domination ; with 
all his falsity, his guilt, his ruthlessness, his baseness — and 
these were very black — he was loyal to an idea, he was 
faithful to a bond. He would betray others without a 
scruple, but he would not turn a traitor to his cause ; he 
had so much still left of affinity with the codes and the 
freedom that he ostensibly served. It went far to redeem 

26 


302 


ID ALIA. 


him, all warped and erring though it was — went far to 
raise him above the higher intelligence and the finer sub- 
tlety of the man who tempted him. 

Vane heard him with an acrid wrath; this madman, this 
tool, this wax in his hands, this guilt-stained adventurer, 
whom he thought no more of than he thought of any pis- 
tol that he could use as he would, full of danger to others, 
but to him a mere toy of wood and of steel, shamed him, 
stung him, escaped from him. What Conrad Phaulcon 
shrank from as too foul to stoop to must be foul indeed ! 

“ I congratulate you on your new nobility, mon cher,” 
he said, indolently, with that covert sneer which the Greek 
had learned to dread as a hound dreads the lash. “ I did 
not know there was anything you had scruples about, but 
I am glad there should be ; — it is a new experience ! I 
take your assurances, however, cum grano salts ; — you 
are quite wise to make them so fervently, seeing that, as 
you observed, a shot or a stab would follow your desertion 
as surely as night follows day. And now, you will allow 
me to remark that you are very imperfectly disguised, that 
you will involve me very disagreeably if you are discov- 
ered here, and that I shall thank you to remove yourself 
from Naples at once.” 

“ But Idalia ?” 

“ You can serve Idalia in nothing by putting yourself 
and every one else in jeopardy. The Church has her ; the 
Church does not lightly let go its prey. All that can be 
done, you are sure, will be done ” 

“ But ” 

Victor lifted his hand again ; a very slight gentle move- 
ment, but before it the fiery impetuosity, the mutinous im- 
patience, of the Greek fell into a soldier’s submissiveness, 
a spaniel’s docility. In their armies there were many 
ranks, but there was only one discipline — implicit obe- 
dience and silence unto death. If his chief had bidden 
him throw himself from the heights of Tiberio, Phaulcon 
would have cast himself headlong down without a ques- 
tion, when once they stood on the ground which that 
slight gesture warned him they were on now — the ground 
of authority on one side, of obedience on the other. 

“Leave all to me. ' And for the present quit Naples 


“THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT.” 303 

while yon can — if you can. Go to the old quarters at 
Paris immediately, and there await instructions. Adieu 1” 

Phaulcon’s eyes looked at him with a piteous entreaty; 
he did not speak, but the great muscles of his throat 
swelled and throbbed, and his nervous hands clinched ; 
the mute appeal spoke better tkah any words his prayer 
against that merciless dismissal. 

‘‘Go, caro } ” said his tyrant, gently; but the gentleness 
was immutable and cold. “ If you feel such tenderness 
for your fair Countess, you should not have drawn her into 
such dangerous paths. Make yourself easy; she can take 
care of herself; there are few men — and 1 doubt if Giulio 
Yallaflor be one of the few — who can match the wit and 
the science of La Yassalis. Now, go; your presence is 
embarrassing, and your melons are a blunder ; but you 
always would be so impetuous I Bon voyagS ; and if the 
Bourbonists should stop you on the way, remember — and 
die mute. An unpleasant and discourteous allusion, I 
confess; but one must face possible contingencies.” 

Conrad Phaulcon looked at him one moment with a 
fierce glare under his curling lashes; but for the bond 
that bound and the authority that fettered him, he would 
have tossed up the Northerner’s slender frame in his 
strong lithe arms, and dashed on the marble without those 
subtle astute brains that baffled and that ruled him. Then 
he dropped his head as a chidden hound drops his — and 
went. 

Alone, his chief sat motionless, his eyes fixed, his arms 
resting on the table before him, his face white and rigid as 
though its profile were the profile of a marble bust. lie 
had been bitterly stung, though he had never shown it ; he 
had been deeply moved, though he had given no sign of it. 
This lawless tiger, this velvet-skinned wild brute, this 
worthless adventurer, this mountain-thief, who shot men 
as willingly as he shot sea-birds, had flung off treachery as 
a villainy too black for him ; and he — a scholar, a gentle- 
man, a wit, a man who ridiculed the barbaric errors of 
crime, and who knew that he had in him intellect to com- 
pass the statecraft of half a world — had found no issue for 
his ambitions, no crown to his career, no end for his at- 
tainments, except a traitor’s shame ! No rebuke from pure 


004 


ID ALIA. 


or lofty lives would have made him feel his own degrada- 
tion so deeply as the revolt of the man whose hardened 
guilt he had known so long, and whose scruples he had 
never before found check at any baseness that was offered 
him ; the man in whom he had himself killed all remnant 
of better instincts, and yhom he had looked on as a merce- 
nary, to be hired at will for any infamy, by whichever side 
could bid the highest. No scorn from those of stainless 
honor or of blameless deeds could have cut him so un- 
endurably as the contempt for his own sin of renegade 
betrayal which had flashed from the glance and lashed 
him in the words of the Greek, whom he had known steeled 
to all remorse and careless of all disgrace. 

“ Faugh !” he thought, with a disdainful bitterness that 
availed little to reconcile him to himself ; “ his is just such 
bastard honpr, such childish folly, as we see a thousand 
times over in the most shameless scoundrels of Europe. 
The brigand murders at his fancy, and reverences a leaden 
saint in his hat ; the brutes of the Abruzzi flay their pris- 
oners, and pray to the Madonna ; the soldiers of the 
Pope kill women and children as they would cut the 
throats of pigs, and tremble when their master blesses 
them on Easter day ; — it is all over the world, that trash 
of superstition, that fit of spurious repentance, that ague- 
attack of poltroonery which men, because they are ashamed 
of it, dignify into conscience or creed ! He would sell his 
soul to the devil if there were such a thing as a devil, and 
yet he prides himself on clinging to an idea which he has 
never followed except for the sake of adventure and self- 
interest, and to a cause which he has never embraced ex- 
cept as a vent for his own listlessness and discontent ! And 
men call that king of straw, that random folly, that weak- 
ness cloaked in borrowed purples, honor!” 

But the ironies that he wove to himself, the contempt in 
which he strove to steep and still the pangs of shame that 
Conrad Phaulcon’s single virtue had awakened, had little 
potency. He was a gentleman, and the disgrace of his sin 
was as gall to him. Something of that humiliation and 
unendurable hatred for his own act which made Iscariot- 
slay himself, finding no value in the silver pieces for whose 
glitter he had wrecked his peace and sold the guiltless. 


“THE devil tempted ME, AND I DID EAT.” 305 

smote even through the ice-mail of his graceful callous- 
ness, the steel cuirass of his worldly policies. 

And — though cowardice had no place in him, as it had 
in the fiery but mobile temper of Phaulcon — a shiver ran 
through him as he thought of those words — “the shot or 
the steel that follows the renegade, as the night follows 
the day.” He knew that they were no hyperbole, no met- 
aphor ; he knew that men who were false to the political 
Order of which they were sworn, died so by that Order’s 
vengeance, almost as surely as darkness falls on the sun’s 
setting — died with a dagger-stroke in the winter nights of 
Rome, a pistol-shot in the gay chambers of Paris, a blow 
from behind in the riotous carnival times of Venice ; died 
wherever they were, struck by unerring hands, and know- 
ing that it was but wild justice for their own Judas sin, 
though the world saw in their fall but some common street 
scuffle, some murder of continental lawlessness, some thief’s 
assassination for a few gold coins. 

He knew it, and a chili tremor passed over him as he 
mused. But a few months before, a sculptor had been 
found at the door of his studio in Rome with a great 
wound slashed across his breast, and the blood choking his 
voice, so that he died speechless. The talk of the day had 
drafted that death in among the deeds of violence that 
Roman thieves will deal in, and babbled of the insecurity 
of life under the Papal tenure, and of the sad fate of the 
young genius struck down for a few bajocchi on his own 
threshold. Victor Vane had been aware, as many like 
him also, that no Roman thief had been the dealer of that 
stroke home to the lungs as the sculptor felt his way up 
the dark winding staircase, whose blackness the oil flicker 
of a single lamp only rendered deeper gloom ; but that it 
had been a pitiless vengeance for an oath taken in boy- 
hood, and in manhood broken. 

He knew it ; wherever he went, whatever he did, howso- 
ever high he rose in eminence, whatsoever fruitage he 
gathered from the seed of treachery, the possibility of that 
doom would pursue him, the dread of it would haunt him 
— a worse fate than the stroke itself, sharply and swiftly 
dealt. The sword would ever hang above his head when- 
ever his banquet should be spread, whatever nobles and 
u 26 * 


sod 


1DALIA. 


princes should be summoned to it. Let him dupe his 
early comrades, or reign in his new sovereignties as he 
would, he could never dismiss this from him — this chance, 
that soon or late the vengeance for his desertion would 
search him out, and strike him in the hour of his surest 
security, of his proudest triumph. 

Yet the step was taken ; there was no receding now, 
and he knew that he had in him to rule empires if once he 
could grasp but the hem of power. He ground his teeth 
where he gazed down on the mosaic on which his arms 
rested, with the sharply-defined delicacy of his features, 
death-white in the golden sun-glow that fell through the 
broad leaves of vine. 

“ I was wrong to say there is no devil,” he thought ; 
“ there is one that cripples the strongest and tempts the 
wisest, and sets the fool above the sage, and kicks genius 
into a hovel to die, and gives diadems to idiots, and makes 
great lives plod wearily for daily bread round the ass’s 
mill, and in the ass’s shafts ; there is a devil that runs riot 
in the world, flinging all the prizes to the dullards who let 
them rust, and tossing all the blanks to the men who only 
want a chance to prove their mettle ; there is a devil that 
leaves thrones to brainless dullards, and scratches out the 
winning blood from every race because it has no pedigree, 
that fills swine’s troughs with pearls, and seals lips that 
drop eloquence ; there is a devil that flings the wheat to 
the flames, and calls the chaff blessed bread, that lames 
the boldest ere they can start, and curses the new-born 
child in his cradle; there is a devil — the devil of Caste !” 

When the failings of Democracy are hooted against her, 
one fair thing in her should be remembered — that in hei 
sovereignties this one deadly bitterness, this passionate, 
poignant regret for all he might have been , had not Posi- 
tion warped, and cramped, and proscribed, and starved 
him, can come unto no man. 

And there is no evil worse than this; for by it the man 
casts back on accident (and often with a terrible justice) 
all the errors, the failures, the sins, and the disgraces of 
his life. “I never had a fair field !”• — it may be sometime? 
a coward’s apology ; but it is many a time the epitome of a 
great, cramped, tortured, wasted life, which strove like a 


“the devil tempted ME, AND I DID EAT.” 307 

caged eagle to get free, and never could beat down the 
bars of the den that circumstances and prejudice had 
forged. The world sees the few who do reach freedom, 
and, watching their bold upward flight, says rashly, “will 
can work all things.” But they who perish by the thou- 
sand, the fettered eagles who never see the sun ; who pant 
in darkness, and wear their breasts bare beating on the 
iron that will never yield ; who know their strength, yet 
cannot break their prison ; who feel their wings, yet never 
can soar up to meet the sweet wild western winds of liberty ; 
who lie at last beaten, and hopeless, and blind, with only 
strength enough to long for death to come and quench all 
sense and thought in its annihilation, — who thinks of them 
— who counts them? 

Where he sat with his teeth clinched and the nerve of his 
lips twitching, the finished tactician cursed his fate as pas- 
sionately as any Gilbert on his death-bed, any Mirabeau in 
his dungeon. A consuming passion was upon him; and 
under it his philosophies /mocked and his worldly wisdom 
forsook him. It had made him a traitor; it made him now 
weak as any woman. While he had lightly laughed with 
a scoff of her sorcery over the Prelate, his heart had been 
sick with jealousy and dread. He had remembered too 
late what manner of man Giulio Villaflor was; what man- 
ner of ransom the voluptuous Churchman was likely to 
exact from such a captive as he possessed now. He had 
thought too late that, in yielding her up to her foe, he was 
delivering the woman he loved to one who would feel the 
spell of her beauty as utterly as he, and would be armed 
with the power to do with that beauty howsoever he would. 
So that he were revenged on her, he had never heeded 
how that vengeance might recoil. It smote him keenly 
now, as he mused on the amorous, ruthless, unscrupulous 
priest, to whom he had surrendered her. 

In the power of Giulio Villaflor ! — he turned hot and 
cold as the memory passed over him. He had delivered 
her into bondage, that she might be shut away from all 
eyes — that her smile might be seen of none — that what 
could not be his should be no other’s — that the empire of 
her sorcery should end forever in a life of ignominy, of suf- 
fering, and of slavery. But now he shuddered where he 


308 


ID ALIA. 


sat immovable, with the yellow light streaming down 
through the vine; he had given her over to one who never 
spared, to one who would look on her loveliness at once 
with the admiration of a voluptuary and the sway of a 
tyrant; to one who could offer her release from lifelong 
misery as the purchase coin of her love, or could take it, 
if denied, with the mailed grasp of an irresistible and irre- 
sponsible dominion. 

It fascinated him with its very horror, it enchained him 
with its very torture, this thought which he had flung at 
the name of Idalia, to insult her and to taunt his com- 
panion, and which grew into a phantom that he could not 
exorcise, a vision that he could not drive away. Every 
second was horrible to him; he saw the sovereign grace, 
the proud glance of the woman he had betrayed ; he saw 
the full lustrous eyes of the arrogant priest as they would 
be bent upon her; and he ground his teeth as under some 
bodily agony — he had dealt himself a sharper torment than 
any he had condemned her to endure. He had given her to 
bondage — yes, but he had given her also to Giulio Yilla- 
flor ! 

There are women who rouse a passion far more intense 
than can be held in the word love, which makes the man 
who feels it lose all semblance of himself, which sweeps 
away his memory, his honor, his reason, his ambitions, his 
very nature, and leaves him no sense of anything save it- 
self. This was the passion which made her traitor now — 
cold, and keen, and subtle, and world-worn, and skeptical 
as he had been — choke down the great sobs in his throat, 
as he thought : 

“ Only to know her dead, so that no other can ever look 
on her ; only to know that ! Dead, dead, dead ! she would 
seem mine then. And yet, — I should rifle her grave like 
the madman in legends, for one sight of her face, for one 
touch of her lips 1” 


THE CAPTIVE OP THE CHURCH. 


309 


CHAPTER XXII. 

THE CAPTIVE OP THE CHURCH. 

In the interior stood a small castellated building flanked 
with towers of a singular solidity and strength, and case- 
ments built deep into the solid masonry, the narrow slits 
and dwarfed arches of the early centuries. The country 
round was dreary ; marsh and osier bed, with the rushes 
turning from spring green to autumn hues as the season 
varied, and to the left, interminable olive-fields, bounded 
in the distance with a somber line of cypress, had little 
beauty, even when the southern sunset gave them its glow ; 
and the place where the building stood, a black and broken 
pile of irregular rock, with a lake below, hemmed in by 
dark and stunted trees, lent only a deeper gloom and lone- 
liness to the landscape. In the middle ages the towers 
had been a robber’s stronghold, called the Vulture’s Ages, 
and sorely feared by travelers ; now, it was Church prop- 
erty, a few Cistercians held it as their convent, and, if it 
were ever used for other purposes, the slow swinging of 
the matins’ bell, which dully droned over the desolate lands 
around, stilled all rumor of the fact. 

A tempestuous sun was setting in the west; intense fire 
lighted for the moment all the rugged and monotonous 
expanse, flamed in the salt and sluggish waters of the tarn, 
and reddened all the arid desert of the parching turf. 
Through a lancet window it shone into a darkened barren 
room ; the gray stone floor uncovered, the pine-wood walls 
as bare, and the meager furniture of a convent cell, the 
only things that garnished it. To and fro in the narrow 
limits paced, as a lioness may pace her den, Idalia. She 
was a prisoner of a King and of a Church — two jailers that 
never in any age have loosed their prey. 

The hour had come that she had long foreseen must 
sooner or later be her fate ; she was in the hands of foes 
whom but a tithe of all that she had done would ha\e suf- 


310 


IDALIA. 


ficed to hound to their worst fury. Fear was not in her 
now ; the blood of Artemesia and of Manuel was in her 
veins, and the fire of the Sea Queen and of the Imperial 
Soldier flamed too hotly and too proudly there to let 
dread enter. But a terrible chafing sense of utter impo- 
tence, a longing to dare, to defy, to vanquish, while she 
was here a captive, a fearful knowledge, a passionate re- 
gret for all that she had lost, for all she might have been, 
made the slow moments , torturing passage unendurable — 
made her hands clinch, her eyes flash, her whole frame 
quiver and rebel in mighty longing, in fearful bitter- 
ness. 

She knew that she had in her what would have found 
power to rule an empire — and she was here the prisoner 
of a Priesthood 1 

But a more intense and a more poignant pang than 
that of her own adversity, of her own peril, was in her for 
other lives lost through her — for the manhood that had 
reeled and fallen at her feet, for the sightless eyes that had 
looked up to hers, for the dead, slaughtered through a too 
true adherence to her will, a too obedient rendering of her 
word. True, the liberty for which they had conspired was 
the just heritage of man, and the noblest cause for which 
human life can ever be laid down; true, it was for their 
country, and that country’s welfare and freedom, that they 
had fallen; but this was no opiate to still the remorse 
that pierced and pursued her. She knew that the cause 
had been far less to those who had died before her than 
the smile of her own eyes; she knew that with her beauty, 
and her power, and her sorcery, she had wooed them to 
passion only to drive them there, by their fealty to her, to 
perish like netted stags. She knew that it had been through 
the beguilement of her own unsparing temptation, her own 
ruthless witchery of fascination, that those who had been 
murdered in the night just gone had entered on a career 
which, without her, they might never have embraced. 

The very masked banquet at which they had been 
trapped and slain had been given through her, given for 
her, and turned by her to that end for which the soldiers 
of the king had shot them down as rebels. She knew 
that but for her they would be living now in the fullness of 


THE CAPTIVE OP THE CHURCH. 


311 


their freedom and their manhood ; and the remorse of an 
assassin seemed to weigh on her and haunt her, with the 
blood-red glow of that dying sun, in which the uplifted 
eyes of Viana, as they had sought hers through the mists 
of his last agony, seemed ever to gaze on her. 

She was proud, she was daring, she was unscrupulous, 
she was self-controlled to a marvel, she was, as men 
counted, cruelly heartless ; but in that moment Idalia 
could have doomed herself to the curse of any eternal 
travail of expiation — in that moment she could have rent 
out her living heart where it beat, and have flung it to the 
kites that hovered in the dusky glow of twilight as the 
vilest, darkest, most accursed thing that ever beat with 
life. She had the coldness of the world, and the pitiless 
serenity of one long used to study strong emotions only as 
tools to power; but beneath her acquired calm and cynic 
indifference the fervency of southern nations still slept in 
her, and she loathed herself with the fierce unsparing 
hatred with which men hate their direst foe. 

She did herself injustice in much, and loaded herself 
with heavier reproach than that which had a right to rest 
on her; but it is ever thus with natures strong, bold, im- 
perial, and used to command, when from the exercise of 
unmerciful dominion they change to the lash of self-rebuke 
and self-detestation ; as kings in monastic days laid down 
the scepter and took up the scourge. 

Of her own fate she scarce took a thought ; she knew 
well enough that little mercy would mingle with it; but 
all her heart, all her mind, all her longing, were with those 
dead men who had perished for her, those noble and daunt- 
less lives which had been struck down around her as 
though they had been murrained sheep. In her youth, in 
her beauty, in her wealth, in her supremacy, she was flung 
into captivity, and knew that endless imprisonment, if not 
the shame and labor of some still more humiliating tor- 
ture, would be her doom, but no throb of pity was in her 
for herself ; the only thought upon her was the thought of 
those whom she told herself that she had murdered. 

The bolts of the cell were undrawn with a slow grating 
sound ; she turned and faced the door ; it opened, and 
Giulio Villaflor entered the chamber. The ruddy flame- 


312 


ID ALIA. 


like light just fading in the west was shed full upon her ; 
the mask dress she had worn had not been changed, and 
the diamonds on it flashed amid its scarlet, its black, and 
its gold ; in her weary musings she had thrust back from 
her temples the masses of her diamond-crowned hair, and, 
though her face was very colorless and her eyes heavily 
circled, she had never looked more magnificent than she 
looked now, as she turned with an empress’s challenge. 

Villaflor, entering with the soft and courtly step of his 
habitual grace, started and paused, with a Roman oath 
murmured involuntarily in his surprise and his admiration. 
He had seen her in Paris, in Spain, in Vienna, but in that 
instant her loveliness literally struck him blind ; he came 
to arraign a captive, and a queen faced him in haughty 
and silent disdain. Fluent, facile, a statesman and a 
churchman, a libertine and a courtier, he had for the mo- 
ment no words ; he was held in check by his own rebel 
prisoner. 

She looked at him, and a slight smile of contempt 
passed over her face. 

“Ah ! I thought so !” she said calmly. “ So your lambs 
were the wolves, holy father ?” 

The Prince-Bishop changed color ever so faintly; the 
sarcasm of the accent rather than of the words pierced his 
armor of omnipotence and self-love ; he understood why 
men had dreaded the lash and the steel less than they had 
dreaded the lightest touch of this woman’s scorn. But he 
was a powerful and accomplished personage, to whom de- 
feat or opposition were heresies unknown ; he recovered 
his momentary discomfiture, and came nearer to her, the 
warm after-glow on his stately stature, and his handsome 
majestic form, while his lustrous eyes smiled gently. 

“ My daughter, it has grieved us sorely that you should 
have been so long in rebellion against the Anointed of 
God ; and believe me, the harshness of coercion has only 
been resorted to in the last extremity, and with the deep- 
est reluctance and regret.” 

Idalia where she stood turned her head, and let her eyes 
rest full on his, with a meaning more than any words could 
ever have expressed. 

“ Monsignore, it will bo as well for us to lay aside these 


THE CAPTIVE OF THE CnURCH. 


313 


euphuisms. Neither of us believes them, and they weary 
both. Let us suppose them already uttered, and speak 
more truly — if a priest can speak so. I am your captive ; 
it has long been one of the supreme ambitions of your life, 
and one of the most relentless efforts of your Cburch. I 
have baffled you long ; you have trapped me at last. 
There is no more to be said.” 

Monsignore, the silken and astute diplomatist who wove 
the finest meshes of Court and Vatican intrigue, and was 
to be embarrassed by no living antagonist’s skill, felt the 
blood burn under his olive skin, and felt the weakness of a 
bitter anger rise in him beneath the brief, tranquil, ironic 
words of his captive. Monsignore was never angered ; 
the dulcet sweetness of his bland repose was never stirred 
by so provincial and unwise a passion ; and he knew her 
power by that pulse of wrath she could stir in him. Yet 
he restrained it perfectly ; he bowed with the grace for 
which he was renowned at St. Cloud and Compiegne. 

“ Pardon me, figlivola mia ” 

“ Pardon me, Monsignore ! I am not of your commun- 
ion ; call me simply Madame de Vassalis.” 

The Prince-Bishop made a gentle deprecatory gesture 
with his white and elegant hands. 

“Even those who have strayed from us we still hope to 
reclaim ; and I speak as beseems me in the name of the 
Church. You have thought ‘there is no more to be said,’ 
since by force you have been brought within our author- 
ity. You err greatly ; there are many things.” 

Her old superb, disdainful smile came on Idalia’s face ; 
the entrance of the churchman had roused in her all her 
native pride, all her worldly brilliance, ‘all her royal defi- 
ance ; she knew well enough with whom she had to deal, 
and the assumption of authority awoke in her all her dig- 
nity and dauntlessness. 

“ Many things ?” she repeated, tranquilly. “ Possibly ! 
You would wish to know from me — your captive — the se- 
crets of my party, the names of my associates, the securi- 
ties of my wealth, many other matters that you consider 
have become yours by right through my conquest ?” 

Giulio Yillaflor looked at her curiously, a little bewil- 
dered. 


27 


314 


ID ALIA. 


“ It is so, my daughter,” he said, blandly. “ We would 
rather, you will be sure, receive these — our rights, as you 
justly say — voluntarily from you than be compelled to ex- 
tract them by harsher means.” 

She laughed a little ; a soft, mocking, ironic laugh. 

“ I imagined so. Well — it is as I said ; there is nothing 
to be discussed between us ; for all the weight of your 
Church, all the steel of your Swiss, will not force one word 
from me.” 

Monsignore started, and the purple blood flushed under 
the olive of his cheek and brow; his lips quivered, his 
teeth clinched on the full scarlet under lip. It was so 
utterly new to Giulio Villaflor to be mocked and bearded 
— and by a woman too ! 

His dulcet courtliness gave way, his mellow and honeyed 
sweetness curdled, the fire flashed into his eyes that had 
used to burn in the darkling glance of the men of his great 
hierarchy when Savonarola braved them or Kings defied 
their legate. 

“ ‘ Will not ’ is never said to Rome I” he answered, with 
the haughty grandeur of the mighty days of the Papacy. 

She faced him with a sovereignty not less disdainful and 
supreme. 

“ Indeed ! I think many who have said it have been 
slain by Rome, silent unto death !” 

His face darkened more and more; “ contumacy” was 
the deadliest sin in his eyes ; he would have stricken it out 
with the iron heel of Torquemada or Ximenes. 

“ Some crave death, and are forbidden it; they must live 
to do our bidding.” 

The words were, uttered low, and the menace, though 
vague, was pregnant. For the moment there was intense 
silence, but her eyes never shrank, only in them deeper and 
deeper gathered the mute and fiery scorn. 

“You threaten me?” she said, with cool, contemptuous 
carelessness, reckless how she provoked, so that she stabbed 
him. “It is scarcely worth while to so stain your man- 
hood and your calling, Monsignore. I am in your power. 
There is little dignity in menace to a prisoner.” 

The kingly potentate, the silken churchman, the absolute 
tyrant, the tortuous courtier, shook in all his limbs with 


THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHURCH. 


315 


rage She took his weapons from him, she rent his pano- 
ply, she silenced his eloquence, she pierced his nets, and 
an insidious passion crept in on him. She looked so 
beautiful there, in the fading russet light, with her Greek 
grace and her ironic pride, and her fettered, untamed, 
deathless royalty ! 

“ She is a Semiramis I She is a sorceress ! ” he mut- 
tered in his throat, as he turned and paced the cell a mo- 
ment, to still the feverish, angered, impatient bitterness 
rising in him and unnerving him. He felt to her as in the 
days of the Middle Age men felt to those women whom 
they sent to the stake for the dangerous sorcery, the white 
magic, of their too great charms. 

She waited there, serene, unmoved, her eyes looking 
outward at the desolate and barren marshes, her hair 
slightly pushed back from her brows, the richness and the 
glitter of her mask dress the sole point of color in the 
gray gloom of the cell. She looked like a picture burnt in 
on the darkness of the naked prison wall. 

His glance, licentious and ruthless under the velvet gen- 
tleness of his long-studied regard, devoured her loveliness 
with thirsty, astonished admiration. He had said of her 
that she had the daring of the Caesars, but he thought now 
that she had the intoxication of a Cleopatra. He had 
heard of her power, he had heard of her witchery, he had 
heard of the insanity of men who loved her and thought a 
world well lost for her; he felt and understood the mean- 
ing of those stories now. And a proud, eager, cruel light 
dawned on his face. “ Altro /” he murmured to himself, 
with the mocking smile of his full lips. What mattered it 
— her defiance, her beauty? She was his captive ! Nomi- 
nally the king’s captive, virtually his. What mattered re- 
sistance ? 

He paused before her, subduing the glow of his thoughts 
beneath the fail of his silken lashes, long and soft as the 
lashes of women ; and his voice had its sweetest melody. 

“Madame de Yassalis, hear me. You have said justly 
you are a prisoner; in the power of a sovereign you have 
conspired against, of a government you have sought to un- 
dermine. To underrate your power for rebellion and for 


316 


IDALTA. 


evil would be absurd ; it has been vast, and wrought by 
the surest spells that subjugate the heart and the soul of 
man ■” 

Her delicate, merciless smile arrested the words on his 
lips. 

“What do you know* of those spells, holy father?” 

Though her life was in this man’s power, to use as he 
would, she could not restrain the irony that gave her, the 
captive, so keen a weapon against her tyrant. A smile 
for which she could have killed him gleamed under his 
drooped lids. 

“Had I never known them until now, this moment had 
sufficed to teach them !” 

A haughty impatience swept over Idalia’s face. 

“Sir ! 1 have had my surfeit of such compliments. From 
a priest I may surely look for immunity from their weari- 
ness.” 

The tiger-glitter glistened more darkly in his soft brown 
veiled eyes. IIow could he deal with this woman ? Menace 
had no terror for her, hon\age no charm ! Unconsciously 
his voice hardened and grew more imperious ; she was the 
first who had ever braved or baffled him. 

“Madame,” he pursued, disregarding her words, “you 
know that you are liable to the full rigor of the law ?” 

“I know that I am in the power of those who never 
failed to use that rigor with or without right !” 

“The church cannot err,” he said, with the certain fiery 
majesty which, tyrannous and blind in its own belief of 
infallibility as it was, was yet the truest and greatest thing 
in him. “You fall within the pale of its most severe jus- 
tice ; yet the church, as you know well, will not deal with 
you; your sins will be left to the Secular Arm. Your 
wealth will be confiscated, your power crushed, your life 
passed in a felon’s cell. You must know this.” 

“ My wealth cannot be confiscated,” she answered neg- 
ligently, “for there is none of it lodged in Italy; you 
could scarcely imagine me so incautious ! That you will 
give me no liberty while I have life I perfectly understand, 
and that King Francis and the Pontifical States alike treat 
the love of freedom and of justice as a convict’s crime, all 
Europe is well aware. If you allude to my riches, imag* 


THE CAPTIVE OP THE CHURCH. 


317 


ining that T will purchase ray safety, you err ; I will not 
swell a tyrant’s treasuries to gain a personal indulgence.” 

Rage, hot and lowering, flushed Giulio Yiilaflor’s brow 
as he heard ; yet something of that unwilling homage 
which had been wrung from him when he had said, “ She 
has the daring of the Caesars 1” was wrested from him now 
in an admiration that was half amaze, half intolerance ; 
wholly sudden and very ferocious passion was controlled 
beneath the suave mellow hypocrisies which by long usage 
had become to him as second nature. 

“ Madame,” he said, with a wave of his long delicate 
hand, “there are enormities and conspiracies of such mag- 
nitude that the wealth of the world could not purchase 
condonation or escape for them. Those of the Countess 
Idalia must be expiated ; they cannot buy absolution either 
from the church she has blasphemed or the throne she has 
shaken. Captivity awaits you — captivity till death. Has 
it no terrors for you — for you , in your beauty, your youth, 
your magnificence, your reign of love and of pleasure ?” 

She looked him full in the eyes : 

“ Monsignore, you use strange language for a priest. 
Whatever my fate be, I merit it; not for the things which 
you quote against me as crime, but for luring to their 
graves the lives you and your murderers slew last night.” 

The nerves of his cheeks quivered with agitated wrath ; 
not for his bishopric would he have had it known that he 
had looked on at the slaughter, and given the death-word 
at the Villa Antina. She laughed, in the aching bitter- 
ness of her heart, and in her dauntless scorn for the foes 
who had netted her in like a wired bird. 

“Ah, that was a noble exploit, beau sire ; a gentle and 
holy duty of an anointed of Christ 1 The cross has led 
the van of the slaughterers of life and of liberty many a 
time ; you but followed the mission of priests in all ages, 
— to sow broadcast war and desolation, and to pile dead 
bodies by fire or by steel for the glory of God in the mis- 
sion of peace ! Go and kneel with Viana’s blood on your 
head ! — go and fill the throne of St. Peter with the murder 
of patriots heavy on your soul ! Go — you have done no 
more than the men of your office have ever done since 
Hypatia was slain by Cecil and the early Christians tore 

27 * 


318 


IDALIA. 


and fought for rivalry in Alexandria, and Rome, and By- 
zantium !” 

The light of the sun had died out, there was only the 
silvery gleam of a lamp Giulio Villaflor had brought in in 
his hand, and set down on the narrow stone table ; in the 
mingled radiance and shadow she stood before the omnipo- 
tent Churchman, in whose hands her destiny was held, as 
though she were a feudal monarch who lashed a disobedi- 
ent vassal with her displeasure and disdain. lie stood, 
doubting his own senses; he the superb priest, he who 
aspired to the triple tiara, he the friend of emperors and 
the ruler of palace consciences, to be arraigned by a revo- 
lutionist, by an adventuress, whom his will could consign 
to the Yicaria, to linger there for life ! He was convulsed 
scarce less with amaze than with wrath; and yet through 
all something of homage was wrung to the majestic courage 
which thus defied him. 

“ Per fedc I” cried the prelate, the fury and the amaze- 
ment in him breaking through the ever-impenetrable mask- 
ing of his dulcet graciousness. '‘Per fede 1 you are bold 
indeed I” 

“ I leave cowardice to ecclesiastics, who net brave men 
like foxes, and who menace a captive when she can no 
longer revenge 1” 

A flush of shame and irritation came on his cheek ; he 
was intolerant, cruel, cunning, an intriguer, a liar, a man 
of unscrupulous ambition, of intense and overweening pride 
and vanity ; but he was withal a gentleman, and he felt the 
sting of the rebuke. 

'‘I came — not to menace, but to persuade,” he said, re- 
straining the ardor she had roused in him, and bending on 
her the full luster of his soft eyes. “ My daughter, you 
cannot suppose but that it is with the utmost repugnance, 
and only at the last extremity, that force will be resorted 
to by those you have so justly aroused against you. Your 
years, your sex, your brilliance, all render the task of chas- 
tisement, the exercise of severity toward you, a most pain- 
ful duty.” 

She smiled. 

“ Neither royalty nor priesthood are likely to suffer much 
from compunction ; and as for the things you name, I take 


THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHURCH. 


319 


nc refuse in the shield of my sex’s weakness. I believe few 
men have merited yonr hatred and your rigor, or the ven- 
geance of any tyranny, more than I have done.” 

Again she broke his patience, again she rent aside the 
courteous, polished suavity which never until now had 
failed him. 

“ You speak idly,” he said, with a jarring anger and in- 
solence in his voice. “ You toy with words you know not 
the meaning of ; you little dream what our ‘rigor,’ what 
our ‘ vengeance’ can be to those who brave us !” 

Her eyes rested calmly and contemptuously on his : 

“Do I not? When my best-beloved friend Virginia 
von Evon was scourged in the streets of Pesth because she 
would not yield up an Hungarian ‘ rebel’ who had trusted 
his life to her keeping; when Pauline Lasla perished under 
the ice and the irous of Siberia because she had carried 
dispatches for a Polish liberator; when the Oountess 
Rossellio, at eighty years of age, was thrown into a dun- 
geon by your order because she had lost her two noble 
sons in the cause of her Italy ; when the wife of Manuel 
Canaro was shot down before his eyes by the soldiers of 
the Pope for no sin save that of loving liberty and him 
too well ; when I have seen those and a score more martyrs 
like them, do you think I know nothing of how your 
hierarchy and your monarchy can revenge themselves on 
women ? It is you, Monsignore, who speak idly; I am 
well aware that you will essay captivity first, and if that 
do not break me into betraying my friends to you and as- 
signing you my wealth, why, then, that you will try — tor- 
ture ! It may be as well to spare you the probation, and 
to let you know that, though you have fettered me, you 
have not vanquished me, and never will. Others have 
died silent, and so can I.” 

The words were spoken tranquilly, with no haste, with 
no excitement in them ; only beneath their repose of ut- 
terance was that fine, keen infliction of scorn, that proud, 
unyielding patience of resolve, which goaded and incensed 
him as no torrent of reproaches or of lamentations could 
have done. And yet, even in his wrath, even in his amaze, 
even in his outraged majesty as priest and autocrat, he 
could not bi>t yield her admiration — admiration that stung 


320 


I BALIA. 


and fanned the passion in him to fire. He stood before 
her, as a Papal Legate might have stood before an Em- 
press who defied his mission and the might of Rome, rather 
than as before a- helpless and rebel captive. 

“ True ! 77 he said, with that grandeur of dominance which 
made the iron priests of a dead age the scourge and terror 
of empires. “True! the Church must cut off and root 
up, even with steel and flame, the unworthy and the ac- 
cursed who deny her supremacy. Pity can have no place 
where her holiness is menaced, where her kingdom is de- 
nied, where her reign is outraged. True ! — even your sex 
canuot spare you from the chastening that she must, in the 
fullness of her divine love, bestow on you for the purifica- 
tion of your heresies and your rebellion ’ 7 

She stayed him with a gesture : 

“Nay, Monsignore! we are not in the Cinque Cento, 
and 3 ou cannot burn me, though you can slay me more 
slowly and more cruelly, perhaps. A truce to this melo- 
drame ! We are both of the world ; let us speak without 
tragedy. You say the Secular Arm will deal with me for 
my ‘crimes, 7 why then are you here ? 77 

The direct question staggered him slightly, but Giulia 
Villaflor was very rarely at fault ; he bowed with grace. 

“ Because I would fain save you, were it possible, from 
the fruits of your own misguided recklessness. 77 

“I thought so, 77 she said, calmly, while his eyes fell be- 
neath her smile. “ I have said, I betray no one ; and I 
give no bribes. 77 

“In gold — no. And I seek none. 77 

He leaned nearer to her, and his voice sank very low ; 
the flush burnt darker in his olive cheek, and his eyes 
gazed on her beauty with a boldness that gleamed out un- 
der their veiled and velvet softness with a tiger-like ferocity, 
that those knew well as their death-doom who dared cross 
the will of Monsignore. 

“ In gold — no l 77 she echoed. “ You seek my political 
secrets. Well, you will never have them. 77 

“ What ! 77 His voice was very low still, and vibrated 
with the intensity of restrained passion through the silence 
of tne cell. “ You will renounce your pomp, your wealth, 
your pleasures, your ambitions, your freedom, for the toil 


THE CAPTIVE OF JHE CHURCH. 


32i 


of a convict, tbe chains of a felon, the solitude of a dun- 
geon, the slow, festering, hopeless, endless existence of a 
prisoner whom no power can release save the warrant of 
death 1” 

Her face was still, set, colorless as marble, and as firm : 

“ Yes, if liberty be only to be bought by the shame of 
treachery. ” 

He looked at her, forced out of himself, as it were, by 
the tribute she wrung from him : 

“ Mother of God ! What a man you would have been ! 
— you wGukl have ruled the world. ” 

She smiled with a disdainful weariness. 

“Who knows ? I might have been a court ecclesiastic, 
and sold my soul for power to a sacerdotal lie 1” 

The satire pierced him to the quick, and all the darker 
and more cruel impulses returned on him. He stooped 
and laid his hand, with the amethyst ring that glittered 
like a basilisk’s eyes, down upon hers ; his voice stole very 
low on her ear. 

“ ldalia ! women of your beauty can bribe more potently 
than by gold or state-lore. You shall buy your freedom 
if you will — from me.” 

She understood him ; the blood flashed back into the 
colorless weariness of her face; she flung his touch off 
as though it had pollution; she faced him there in the 
dimness of the lamp-light with a look in her eyes before 
which he, all fearless, steeled, and omnipotent though he 
was, cowed like a lashed hound. Even Giulio Villaflor 
lacked the boldness which should dare twice tempt her with 
that alternative to purchase back her liberty. 

“ Monsignore,” she said, briefly, and each word cut like 
ice, “ if I refuse to be a traitress, I shall scarce consent to 
be your mistress. It were a poor choice of dishonor 1” 

He could have killed her in her haughty beauty, in her 
unsparing answer that laid bare the shame and evil of his 
own heart, that spoke out so mercilessly the meaning of 
his veiled words, of his hinted tempting ! She had dared 
him, she had refused him, she had unmasked him — well, 
she should know of what fashion was the vengeance of lto- 
man blood, of ecclesiastical dominion 1 He bent to her, 
his lips close to her hair, his eyes looking into hers, his 
v 


322 


ID ALIA. 


brown smooth cheek darkly stained with the purple flush 
of passions which nothing but that calm scorn of her fixed 
gaze, which never left him, which never drooped beneath 
the fierce menace of his own, held in any check. 

“ Madame de Vassalis,you might have given your beauty 
for your freedom and your wealth; you have refused. So 
be it! It is in my power without terms or concession. 
You might have reigned my mistress. You shall be now, 
instead, my toy for an hour, and languish, later, till the 
grave, in the King’s prisons or the galley’s shame. You 
were unwise, my brilliant revolutionist, to make a foe of 
me ; you are mine, body and soul, in life and in death — 
mine to take when I will, to give where I choose !” 

And, with these words, he flung his violet robe closer 
about him, and, without a glance at her where she stood, 
swept across the stone floor of the convent cell and left her 
presence ; his keen ear had heard the footfall of a monk 
without. 

“ 1 come, my son — I come !” he said, gently, in his sweet 
lingering voice. “ The captive is contumacious still, but, 
with discipline and persuasion, she may still be reclaimed 
to the august faith. Draw the bolts well — so ! so ! — and 
deal gently with her; she will see her error.” 

Alone where the silver lamp shed its lambent flickering 
light, ldalia thrust her hand within the folds of the rich 
scarlet and weighty broideries and sweeping lace of the 
masquerade dress she still wore, and drew half out from its 
resting-place in her bosom a delicate gold-sheathed Vene- 
tian stiletto, a jewel-studded toy slung by a chain round 
her throat. She looked at the slender, glittering, lithe 
blade, and smiled as she put it back. 

“His ! — while that steel will release me the moment his 
lips dare touch mine !” 

For she had in her the temper of Lncretia. 


J RTEN QUE TOI.” 


323 


CHAPTER XXII I. 

“RIEN QUE TOI.” 

In the warm light of the summer morning the yacht 
steamed her way once more into the harbor of Capri. The 
Venetians were safe, and Erceldoune returned — to suffer, 
as he knew, and suffer hopelessly, yet no more able to hold 
himself back from it than the mariners were able to turn 
their prows from the magic music of yonder Syren Isles. 
Groups of fisher- folk were talking together gravely, and 
with an unwonted sadness on their ruddy, sunburnt faces ; 
as he waded through the knee-deep surf he noticed it — his 
thoughts leapt to her in an instant — he asked the sailor 
nearest him what ailed them. The sailor was the man 
whose brother he had once rescued from the churning 
seas below Tiberio. 

“ It is the Oomtessa Idalia, Signore.” 

“ What of her ?” 

“ They have arrested her !” 

“ Arrested her ?” 

He staggered against the brown timbers of a boat rest- 
ing on the sands, and clinched them hard to keep himself 
from reeling like a drunken man. For the moment, old 
usage in many countries gave the word no meaning on his 
ear save in its criminal sense. 

“ So they say, Signore,” answered the sailor, while his 
strong teeth set mastiff-like. “ If I had been there, they 
should not have touched the hem of her skirts ! It was 
done at the Villa Antina, in the interior ; the soldiers shot 
many, I’ve been told.” 

“ Many ! W ho ?” 

“ Conspirators, Signore — so they say,” replied the Ca- 
priote, who scarcely knew the meaning of the phrase, and 
thought the world governed to perfection if it proved a 
good fishing season, and many visitors came to the coast. 
“ Some tell that his highness of V iana was killed. I don’t 


824 


ID ALIA. 


know about that; but Miladi Idalia is a prisoner of the 
King’s.” 

With an oath, mighty as ever rang over the marches 
from the fierce lips of Bothwell, Erceldoune strode from him 
well-nigh ere the words were ended, and plunged down 
into the thicket of vegetation that led to the beetling cliff 
on which her villa stood. The sun was scorching, the 
ascent on the slope that faced the sea perilous to life and 
limb ; there was no more than a perpendicular granite 
slab towering many feet above the water, covered with fo- 
liage and rock-flowers. But he was a trained mountaineer ; 
he knew the ice-slope of the Alps as well as he knew the 
Border-land ; he was up it with the swiftness of thought, 
swinging himself in mid-air from the tough coils of the 
tangled creepers till he reached the summit, and forced his 
way, without pause or ceremonial, into the court of the 
forsaken dwelling. 

“ No one passes !” 

A soldier on guard stood within the arched entrance. 
Then he knew that it was true, and that she was lost to 
him, lost to the fangs of the Church, to the dungeons of 
the Bourbons. 

41 By whose order are you here ?” 

The words were hoarse and faint; he felt his lips 
parched with a dry white heat. 

“The order of the King.” 

“ The King’s ! Stand off !” cried Erceldoune, as though 
the very name of her tyrant maddened him. “ What right 
have you, for all the despots who curse Europe, to invade 
her privacy, to violate her home 1” 

The sentinel said nothing, but lowered his bayonet till 
the blade was leveled against the intruder’s breast. At 
that instant the deep howl of the hound moaned down the 
silence. Erceldoune shook with rage as he heard it. Was 
not her dumb beast even spared! He wrenched the 
weapon by the gunbarrel from the soldier’s hand, flung 
himself on the slight frail form of the Neapolitan, and, 
tossing him aside lightly as a broken bough, dashed across 
the court to where the dog was chained. It was the work of a 
second to unloose and free him. Ere even that was wholly 
done, however, the three soldiers left on guard of the villa, 


325 


“RIEN QUE TOI.” 

which had been rifled by governmental order of all papers, 
plate, jewels, and articles of value, roused by their com- 
rade’s cry, poured into the square court, and leveled their 
bayonets at him. 

“ Stir, and you are a dead man 1” said the corporal in 
command. 

A laugh was the only answer Erceldoune gave. His 
blood was up, and in his misery and his fiery rage he 
cared nothing, and almost knew nothing, of what he did or 
said. 

“ At them, Sulla 1” he cried in Servian, lifting his hand. 

With a bound the giant hound sprang on the soldier of 
Francis, and hurled him down as if he had been a dead 
boar. Erceldoune, with the single blow of his left hand, 
leveled another to the ground, and before the last sentinel 
could take aim or raise his fallen fellows, he sprang through 
the gateway, and, with the dog at his side, dashed head- 
long through the gardens and down the mountain road, 
without pause, without heed, well-nigh without sense. 

The glow and color of the world of summer blossom, 
the fragrant stillness of the morning, the swinging of matin- 
bells from a chapel far above, the golden fruit that he 
tossed aside or trampled out as he rushed down the steep 
incline, all seemed dizzy, unreal, intangible ; only one re- 
membrance stood out clear before him — she needed him. 
He felt giddy and blind, a sickening oppression was on 
him, the intense odors of the myrtle and orange-flowers 
were intolerable to him ; he felt maddened and senseless 
with pain ; but he was not a man to yield to misery or 
dread while action was possible, while daring and skill 
could avail aught. Fire burned in his eyes, his lips shook, 
his teeth clinched like a vice ; he grasped the wolf-hound’s 
mighty mane in a gesture that Sulla understood as though 
volumes had been said in it. 

“ We will save her — or kill them” 

The dog seemed instinctively to know that in his liber- 
ator was the avenger of his mistress. He accepted the 
lead, and followed passively. Repeated peril and danger- 
ous emergencies, often met and vanquished by himself alone, 
had given Erceldoune the energetic vigilance, the knowl- 
edge and the patience of a soldier ; his own nature — rash, 

28 


ID ALIA. 


impulsive, and hotly impetuous, the habit of long and 
arduous service, had taught him the value of coolness and 
of self-restraint. His passions and his fiery chivalry of 
temper could have led him now to any madness, could 
have led him to seek out Francis in his own palace, and 
strike him down before all his nobles and all his guards, as 
her tyrant and her abductor. He had the blood in him of 
Border chiefs who had fought for Mary Stuart, and Scot- 
tish soldiers who had served with Gordon’s archers, of 
haughty Castilians who had died for a point of honor, and 
steel-clad Spaniards who had conquered with the Great 
Captain, and a vein of the old dauntless, reckless, fearless, 
romantic knight-errantry of a dead day was in him, little 
as he had known it. His rival had not erred when he 
said that the “Border Eagle” should have lived in the 
Crusades. But not the less did he know now that dis- 
cretion and self-control were needed to serve her ; not 
the less did he bend to their curb the violent longings of his 
own wretchedness. 

He paused a moment where a deep leafy nest of rock 
and foliage screened him from all sight, and tried to still 
the throbbing misery of his thoughts, and search out the 
nearest clew to find her. She was in the power of her 
foes ; royal soldiers held her villa ; that she was deeply 
compromised in political matters was evident; where she 
might now be taken the jailers who held her alone knew. 
He shuddered as he remembered all the histories he had 
heard of the vengeance of the monarchists on those who 
had defied them 1 Her dog was with him ; the sentinels 
would tell the story of his onslaught on them ; if noticed, 
he would be suspected and watched, possibly even ar- 
rested. To go to Naples was to risk arousing suspicions 
that might render every effort to save her useless. He 
must be unknown, untracked, or he could do nothing ; yet 
he must keep the hound with him, for no aid could be so 
sure to track her as Sulla’s scent and unerring instincts of 
fidelity. The dog stood now beside him, the fine nostrils 
quivering, the ears pointed, every nerve on the stretch, 
and every now and then a piteous anguish in the brown 
lustrous eyes as they were turned on him with a low 
heartbroken moan. 


32T 


“RIEN QUE T0I.” 

He stood and thought some moments, then rapidly, and 
keeping ever under the deep shelter of the leaves, he made 
his way by winding paths to the hut of the sailor whose 
life he had saved long before on San Constanza’s-day. It 
stood near the beach, hid under a great ledge of rock, 
like a sea-gull’s nest. As it chanced, the fisherman sat 
without in the sun, singing and mending his nets ; he was 
only just back from a long sail to Calabria. Erceldoune 
went up to him and held out his hand. 

“Nicold, do you remember the night under Tiberio? ,, 

The nets fell on the sand in a heap, all sea-stained and 
clogged with weed. The marinaro, with tears of delight 
in his bright black eyes, and a thousand cries to the Ma- 
donna dell’ Mare, thanked him and blessed him and wor- 
shiped him, and would have knelt down at his feet had he 
been allowed. Life surely was no great matter there in 
the Piccolo Marina, getting scant bread from the depths of 
the waters, spreading the nets on the low flat shingle-hut 
roof to dry, and going out in peril of storms for sake of a 
piece of dry fish for hungry mouths to eat ; yet it must 
have had its pleasures too, for the fisher Nicolo was grateful 
for saving of it as though he had been crowned with gold. 

“ You will do a thing for me, Colo ?” asked Erceldoune, 
as he arrested the torrent of gratitude. 

“ I will risk body and soul for you, Signore 1” 

“ I believe you would. I only want you to sell me a 
fishing-suit such as you wear, and some of your fishing-nets 
and lines.” 

“ I will sell you nothing, ’Lustrissimo,” said the sailor, 
doggedly, and with a certain wounded pride. ‘T will 
give you everything my poor hut holds.” 

“And I will take it as willingly. Forgive me for using 
the word of barter 1” 

The Capriote’s eyes beamed with delight at the con- 
cession and the comprehension. 

“Come within, Eccellcnza.” 

Erceldoune bent his lofty head, and entered the low, 
square, sea-scented hut, with the half-naked children, hand- 
some as young seraphs running wild, and the yellow gourds, 
and dried herbs, and onion-ropes hanging from the rafters. 
As it chanced, there was a suit, unworn except on saints’ 


328 


IDALIA. 


days, and of full size, for the raarinaro was of high stature 
and powerfully built. In a few moments his own white 
yachting dress was changed for it ; he set the scarlet-tas- 
seled cap on his head, wore nothing over the loose striped 
shirt that left his arms so free, and flung some nets over 
his shoulders With the bronze hue of his skin and the 
sweeping darkness of his beard, no casual glance would 
have detected him to be other than a Capriote. 

“ Shall I pass as a marinaro ? ” he asked the sailor. 

Nicolo smiled. 

“ You look more like a king in disguise.” 

“I am sorry for it. Now, while I wait here, will you 
pull out to the yacht, give the captain this ring from me as 
credentials, and bid him send me, by you, all the gold and 
circular-notes I have on board, my pistol-case, powder- 
flask, cartridge-case and shot-belt, and a pocket-flask of 
brandy ? Say nothing of my disguise, and be as quick as 
you can, for God’s sake.” 

The Capriote obeyed, got his little boat out rapidly, 
and pushed off from the shore with hearty good will. 
Erceldoune sat at the hut door with the hound crouched 
at his feet, and his eyes fixed on the waste of waters. All 
the glories of the bay were spread before him, but it might 
have been a sand-desert for aught that he knew or saw; 
the fishing-skiff flew light and swift as a bird over the sea, 
but to him it seemed scarcely to move ; every moment was 
a pang, every minute appeared eternity. While he waited 
here in the noontide glare, how might she not be tortured ! 
— while the hours flew on, how might not her foes be 
wringing her proud heart 1 Time was passing so fast : 
three days, they said, had gone by since the arrest at 
Antina ; Heaven only knew how many leagues she might 
have been borne since then, to what remote inaccessible 
recesses of Alps or Apennines, monastic prison, or mount- 
ain-shut morass, she might not have been taken ere now ! 
The fever of an intolerable agony possessed him. While 
he was in action he could bear it ; it was something at 
least to be in search for her, to be in her service, to be on 
her track ; but to sit here while those eternal matins tolled 
the passing seconds away, and the fishing- boat seemed to 
glide snail-like over the width of the sea 1 The swinging 


329 


"RIEN QUE TOI.” 

monotone of the chapel bell, the measured dips of the 
oars, seemed to beat into his brain and drive him sense- 
less. What was it to him that she had told him his pas- 
sion was hopeless ? If he could give her back her freedom 
and her happiness, he felt that he could die in peace. 

Nicolo returned very rapidly, laggard as the time had 
appeared, bringing all for which he had been sent. The 
money was the whole, or very nearly, of his three months’ 
pay just drawn — some two hundred pounds or less of cir- 
cular notes in a chamois-leather pouch. He left, unseen, 
several gold pieces of it in a wooden bowl from which the 
fisherman was used to drink his onion soup, then slipped 
the pistols in his sash and the pouch in his shirt, and 
turned again to Nicolo. 

“Now take me across, some way off Naples, if you can, 
and let me land unnoticed in the nearest route for An- 
tina.” 

The marinaro, with all the alacrity of his craft, had 
ready his sailing-boat, a small lugger, awkward but sea- 
worthy, in very little time, and, with his eldest son at the 
helm, pushed off once more into deep water. Erceldoune 
sat silent and deep in thought, the hound at his feet, 
couched on the bottom of the vessel, watching him ever 
with deep, keen, mournful eyes. The day was beautifully 
still ; the bay alive with innumerable craft, and gay with 
sails of tawny stripes and flags of all nations’ hues. Na- 
ples lay white and matchless in her sunlit grace ; he saw 
no more of the glory about him than though he were 
blind. He thought they sailed slowly as a death barge; 
in truth, the lugger danced over the light curled waves 
and through the snowy surf as brightly as a monacco on 
the wing. 

Nicolo knew every inch of the coast, and landed at 
length in a small lonely creek, hidden in profuse vegeta- 
tion, where there was just depth enough to steer the ves- 
sel in, and let the beach be reached by wading. 

“ Yonder lies Antina, Signor,” said the fisherman ; 11 a 
league to the left by that road where the cypresses are. 
You see ?” 

Erceldoune took the man’s brown hand in his and 
wrung it hard. 


28 * 


330 


IDALTA. 


“ I see ! I cannot tbank you now. Nicolo. Later on, 
if I live ” 

The Capriote fixed his large black eyes tenderly and 
wistfully on him. 

“ Eccellenza, you go into some danger. Let me be with 
you.” 

Erceldoune shook his head. 

“ Why not, Signor ?” pleaded Nicolo, entreatingly. 
“When I was in peril, you came to me, down into the 
churning seas, at risk of your own life. The boys can take 
the boat back. Let me come 1” 

Erceldoune put him gently back. 

“Not now, Colo, though' I could wish for no better com- 
rade. But what I do, I must do alone.” 

He broke from the man’s entreaties and conjurations, 
and went up through the tangled thickets of arbutus and 
through the fields of millet rapidly, and never looking 
back ; every moment was so precious. The fisherman 
stood watching him sadly. 

“ It is she,” he said. “ It is so with them all ! She is 
a sorceress. I am glad I crossed myself whenever I met 
her, though old Bice calls her an angel, because she 
promised Fanciulla a dower. I am glad I crossed my- 
self 1” 

A league brought him to Antina — a league that lay 
through olive grounds, and green fields of maize, and 
vineyards, and sunburnt grass-land, which his slashing 
stride, that was the walk of the mountaineer, covered rap- 
idly. To anything like fatigue he was insensible. Since 
the hour when she had found him in the pine woods his 
life had been spent in one vain pursuit — the search for 
Idalia ; yet never had he sought her as he sought her now. 

He passed into the villa grounds : nearer the building 
he dared not venture ; it would be occupied, in all likeli- 
hood, also by soldiers, and the sight of a fisherman loiter- 
ing so far inland would of itself excite suspicion. But 
toward the entrance the hound paused, tore the earth up 
in mad haste, snuffed the ground, ran round and round 
again, threw his head in the air, then gave a deep- 
mouthed bay of joy, and looked back for a sign to Ercel- 
doune. He stooped and laid his hand on the dog’s mane ; 


331 


“MEN QITE toi.” 

his own heart was beating so thickly that he felt sick and 
reeling; here his one hope had centered — that Sulla would 
find her trail. 

“ Seek her,” he said, simply. 

The hound needed no other command ; with his muzzle 
to the earth he tore it up by handfuls, searching hither 
and thither ; then settled to his work as the pack settle to 
line-hunting, and dashed off — not inward toward the gar- 
dens, but out to the open country. Stooping an instant 
ere he followed him, Erceldoune, whose eye and ear were 
well-nigh as trained as an Indian’s — for they were those of 
one of the first deer-stalkers of Scotland, — saw the mark of 
wheels, very faint on the parched arid turf that was dry 
and bare as bone, but still there. Hope rose in him ; — if 
he were not too late ! 

Onward he went in the burning sun-glare, with the 
weight of the nets on his shoulder, and the heat pouring 
down into the scarlet wool of the fishing-cap ; onward, 
where the dog led through the long heat of the day, 
through the shades of evening, through the stilly silver 
starlight, as one succeeded the other. It was tedious, 
arduous, wearying work; bringing so little recompense, 
needing such endless patience. Often the hound lost scent, 
and had to try back to where he had lost the sign of the 
wheels, as though it were the slot of a stag ; often the dry 
crisp grasses or the baked white dust of the roads bore no 
scent at all, or the crossing and recrossing of other tracks 
blurred the marks and confused the trail ; often the im- 
press of a mule’s hoofs or the heavy footprints of a conta- 
dina had struck out or overlaid the faint traces which only 
guided the dog. Often, also, for a priest, or a peasant 
party going to an injiorata , or, worse yet, for a set of sol- 
diers scouring the country, he had to seek shelter in some 
dank dell of woodland, on some sandy pine-knoll, under 
the gray twisted olives, or beneath a tumble-down shed, 
and hide, as though he were himself the prisoner hunted, 
forcing Sulla to lie still beside him. But he had spent 
many a long day in the patient toil of deer-stalking in the 
Highlands at home, and he brought the same wariness and 
the same long endurance here. If he had once abandoned 
himself to the misery of thought, to the fierceness of ven- 


332 


ID ALIA. 


geance, be could never have borne the intolerable slow- 
dragging bitterness of this endless search ; but he would 
not give way to them, and he would not let them urge him 
into the madness which could have made him dash down 
into Naples and demand her at the hands of the Bourbon 
He knew that if it were possible to save her, thus only 
could it be done ; and he gave himself to the toil without 
pause, and with a self-restraint that cost him more than 
all. 

Three days and three nights were spent thus ; he began 
to think in his agony that he should only find her — if ever 
he found her — dead. His search was chiefly made after 
the sun was down ; the day, when he had not to secrete 
himself and the hound from those who might have thought 
their aspect suspicious, and from village authorities who 
might have challenged his appearance away from a sea- 
port, he spent in questioning the country people, as far as 
he could, without exciting wonder or counter inquiry. 
Happily, he could speak the Neapolitan patois to a mira- 
cle, and he supported his character of a fisherman well 
enough with most; some thought, like Nicolo, that he 
looked more like a prince in disguise, but he was frank 
and comrade-like with them, drank with them, ate their 
own coarse food, and could give them a hand in mending 
their roof after a storm, in digging a trench round their 
olives, or in reaping their maize, and he lived so like one 
of themselves, that he soon conciliated them, and per- 
suaded them that he was a paid-off mariner who had sailed 
to far distant places, and liked now to wander at will over 
the country. 

From them he gleaned various news ; nothing that told 
him, however, the one great thing — where Idalia had been 
taken. When the sun set each day, and he was free from 
observation, he put Sulla on the track again, from the 
spot where they had last left it, and worked on the line 
unwearyingly through the nights. The hound had been 
perfectly trained, and understood what was needed of him 
to a marvel; he had attached himself to Erceldoune with 
a strange sagacity of instinct, seeming to lay aside the 
jealousy he had hitherto shown him for sake of their mu- 
tual love and service to the one both had lost. Such sleep 


333 


“B.IEN que toi.” 

as he was obliged to take he took in the hottest hours of 
the day under the screen of millet-sheaves, or iu the cool 
shade of deep ravines filled with chestnuts or cypresses; 
with the fall of evening he resumed the search, and 
through the clear lambent light of the Italian moon, or in 
the gloom of frowning hills and woods, the two shadows 
of the man and dog glided unceasingly ; bending down 
and seeking hither and thither ; — some who saw them 
crossed themselves, and took them for the shades of some 
ghastly huntsman and his phantom hound ; others, more 
practical, took them for truffle seekers, despite the gigan- 
tic size of the animal. Not one ever ventured to stop 
them ; a rough muleteer once tried a parley in the mid- 
night on a lonely hillside path, and said something, with a 
menace, of his fancy for the brandy-flask, whose silver 
head he saw under the folds of the waist-sash ; but a blow 
with the butt* end of one of the pistols soon silenced him 
by leveling him with the brown-burnt moss, and Ercel- 
doune was molested no more. Slowly — very slowly — and 
with an infinite toil and patience, he worked his way by 
the guidance of the hound’s lead, till the dawn of the 
fourth day brought him into the rugged, desolate, morass- 
intersected country, where, dark and sullen above the 
miasma-haunted lake at its foot, the square castellated 
building of the isolated monastery stood among its stunted 
trees, with the bare gray cliff towering at its back. It 
was a red, stormy, misty, oppressive morning, very hot 
and poisonous in its heat as the steam rose up from the 
black still waters and the wastes of swamp, while beyond 
stretched the gray of the monotonous olive and the still 
more distant black peaks of cypress-topped hills, as the 
hollow booming vesper-bell of the monks swung wearily 
through the heavy air. “There is no fortress here; is 
the dog in error ?” he thought, as he entered on the dreary 
desert of the level marshy land, with no sound in it except 
the echo of the tolling bell and the noise of the moor-fowls 
startled from their rest among the reeds and sedges. But 
the hound held on, growing keener and hotter as the scent 
grew stronger and the wheel-marks plainer in the damp 
sodden ground than they had been on the dusty roads and 
the traversed highways. With his muzzle to the ground, 


334 


ID ALIA. 


he dashed onward mile on mile across the country at a 
speed that taxed the Border fleetness of his companion. 
There were quagmires, morass, hidden pools, sponges of 
mud, small lagunes hidden under treacherous grasses or 
rushes, unseen pools where the water-birds brooded by 
hundreds, swamps where a single false step would be death 
for any sinker under the yielding, soaking, nauseous mass ; 
but the houftd never missed his footing or erred in his 
going, and Erceldoune followed him through the gray of 
the morning; his heart beat to suffocation, the brown 
lonely waste reeled before his eyes, the hot noxious air 
seemed to weigh down his breath and stifle him, but a de- 
lirium of hope came on him ; — the dog must be near at 
last ! Straight in his level chase, straight as though he 
were running down a stag across an open plateau, fleet as 
the wind, and with his mighty crest bristling and his eye- 
balls red with flame, Sulla led on, across the marshes, 
across the shallow ponds, over the trembling mass of 
water-sodden earth, through the steaming vapor rising 
from the lakes — led on till be stood under the broken 
granite crags on which the monastery was raised above 
the still, black, reedy surface of the lake. 

Then, with one rolling bay like thunder, he woke all the 
echoes of the lonely silent dawn. Afar from on high, 
through the gloom of an arched casement, through the 
swaying flicker of dank leaves, through the transverse 
lines of iron bars, eyes dark as night, weary as pain, looked 
down on him ; — they were the eyes of Idalia. 

She sat in the monastic cell which was her prison- 
chamber, with the bare hot glare of the sunlight, that 
burnt all nature black and barren, and made the dis- 
ease-laden vapors rise up from the swamps below, scarcely 
entering through the narrow lancet-chink that was the sole 
casement of this cold stone cage, iu which they had shut 
their brilliant plumaged bird. Her hands rested on the 
slab of granite that was her only table ; links of steel held 
the wrists together : they had allowed her no change of 
raiment, and the lustrous colors and gold broideries of 
the mask dress still swept the damp flags of the floor, 
though all jewels had been taken from her. She had been 


“RIEN QUE TOI." 


335 


here six days and six nights a captive of the Bourbons ; 
what was yet worse, a captive of the Church. 

Food of the coarsest and the scantiest was all that had 
been allotted her, and once — “for contumacy,” — her 
priestly jailer’s hands had been stretched to tear down the 
silks and lace from her shoulders, and bruise and lacerate 
them with the scourge ; once — when the dignity that they 
were about to outrage so foully had made the monk, who 
was bidden to the office, drop the lash, aghast and trem- 
bling, and his superior, who had directed the infamy, feel 
too much shame in the moment to hound. him on to his 
work. They had desisted for twenty-four hours more. 
“By then,” they had muttered, “the rebellious subject 
might have broken her silence, and become less obdurate 
to the due demands of Church and King.” 

The twenty-four hours had well-nigh gone by, but Idalia 
had given no sign of yielding; she had scarcely spoken 
since the day that Giulio Villaflor had quitted her pres- 
ence. She knew that the lightest word might be con- 
strued into confession, or used as evidence against those 
whom they wanted her to betray ; and she had strength in 
her to endure torture unflinchingly, without breathing one 
syllable that should sound as an entreaty for mercy, or be 
translated into a hint against her comrades in adversity. 
She knew well what she had to anticipate ; she did not 
seek to palliate to her own thoughts the horror of the 
doom that awaited her; she knew that only by death, self- 
dealt, could she escape the passion of the libertine who 
held her in his gripe ; she knew that when that had had 
its way, and grown sated of its own violence, she would if 
she lived, drag out existence in agony, in shame, in felon 
companionship, in hopeless bondage ; she never veiled 
from herself the depth and the despair of the wretchedness 
that awaited her, and she knew that not even her sex 
would shelter her from the barbarity of physical torture, 
till that torture should kill her bodily strength, or her per- 
secutors learn that it was powerless to destroy her resolve 
and break her silence. She knew the fate that awaited 
her, but never for one instant did the thought glance by 
her that she could purchase freedom from it all by betray- 
ing those whose lives she held in her keeping, or by going 


336 


IDAL1A. 


willingly to the loathed love of her ecclesiastical captor. 
Such weakness as that was not possible to her nature ; 
she bad a virile courage, a masculine reading of ail bonds 
of honor ; this woman, bred in luxury, in self-indulgence, 
in power, in patrician tastes, and epicurean habits, had the 
nerve in her to endure all things, rather than to purchase 
her redemption by a traitor’s recreancy. 

She had been successful hitherto in concealing from her 
jailer the slender shaft of the stiletto, and she was prepared 
in extremity to use it; she had too much of the old Greek 
heroism to fear such a death, and had too many of the old, 
dauntless, pagan creeds not to hold its resource far nobler 
than a long dishonored life of endless misery. 

Where she leaned now, with her chained hands lying on 
the stone, and the darkness and the silence of the stone 
cell about her, her face was colorless, but it had on it no 
fear, no weakness : it was only grave, and very weary. Her 
thoughts had gone to many scenes and memories of her 
past — the past which, in eight brief years of sovereignty, 
had been fuller and more richly colored than a thousand 
drawn-out lives that never change their gray still calm from 
the cradle to the grave. Endless hours of those dead years 
rose before her to haunt her in this black solitude, in these 
chill iron-bound walls, in which the magnificence of her 
life had ended — hours in the lustrous glare of Eastern suns, 
under the curled leaves of palm, and the marble domes of 
ruined temples ; in the laughing riot of Florentine nights, 
when the carnival-folly reeled flower-crowned adown the 
banks of Arno ; in the gaslit radiance of Paris, when the 
fetes of the Regency revived for her; in summer even- 
ings in Sicilian air, when the low chants echoed softly over 
Mediterranean waters, and the felucca, flower-laden, glided 
through the starlight to music and to laughter ; in palaces 
of Rome, of Vienna, of Prague, of Venice, where the 
dawn found the banqueters still at their revels, and no 
wines that flushed purple and gold in the blaze of the 
lights and the odors of perfume intoxicated the drinkers 
like the glance of her eyes, like the spell of her smile — all 
these scenes rose up above her, and filled with the hues of 
their life and their splendor the barren, bitter, stone-locked 
loneliness in which she was immured. She had loved her 


33T 


“RIEN QUE TOI.” 

reign; she had loved her scepter; she had loved those 
years so crowded with triumphs, with pleasures, with mirth, 
with wit, with radiance, with homage, with peril that only 
lent them keener zest, richer flavor ; she had loved them, 
though beneath t e purples fetters had held her, and amid 
her insouciance remorse had pursued her ; she had loved 
them — and they were dead forever. She was chained 
here a prisoner of captors who never spared until their 
brother-tyrant, Death, claimed their spoil and their prey 
at their hands. 

“ It is just — only just,” she thought, where her head 
leaned on the cold steel clasping her wrist, and the black 
moisture-dripping blocks of the cell inclosed her as though 
already she were in her grave. “ I sent them to their 
graves ; it is only just that I should have a felon’s doom.” 

A shiver ran through her like a shiver of intense cold, 
though the close air of the cell was oppressive and scorch- 
ing ! It was not for her own life, but for the lives that 
had fallen around her, like wheat beneath the sickle, in the 
banqueting-halls of Antina. 

The silence was unbroken ; one burning ray of the outer 
sun stole through the loophole and flashed on the steel 
gyves inclosing the hand, whose lightest touch had thrilled 
men’s veins like fire, and impelled them where it would ; 
the dank, noiseless, gray gloom was like the gloom of a 
charnel-house. Suddenly on that stillness broke the chal- 
lenge of the hound’s bay. 

Idalia started ; she knew the familiar sound that rolled 
out like the roll of a clarion. The color flushed her face, 
she moved rapidly to the casement ; through the glare of 
the hot, pitiless sun, below, beneath the shelving precipice 
of rock, she saw the dog, and saw who was his comrade. 

She knew him in the first moment that his longing eyes 
looked upward, ancf knew his errand there — knew that he 
had come to save her, or to die with her. 

“ O God ! — he, too 1” 

The words escaped her involuntarily where she stood 
alone, leaning against her prison bars, as the hound shook 
all the echoes from the rocks around with the impatience 
of his summons; she had seen so many perish, she would 
fain have saved this man. 
w 


29 


338 


IDALIA. 


Through the space of the sultry white sun-glare that 
severed them his eyes met hers, and spoke in that one look 
all the force of the ardor, all the fidelity of the devotion, 
that had brought him once more to the woman who, for 
good or evil, had become the ruler of his life. At that 
gaze her own eyes filled, her lips trembled ; such love had 
been oftentimes lavished on her, yet never had it moved 
her as it moved her now. She had told him that no other 
thing save misery could come to him through her ; she had 
forbidden him even the baseless solace of hope; she had 
bade him fear, scorn, hate, flee from her ; and nothing had 
killed his loyalty, nothing had burnt out his passion. 

A glow of warmth passed over her ; an infinite tender- 
ness made the tears gather in her eyes as she saw this faith 
against all trial borne to her, this chivalry through every 
ordeal stanch to her. 

“ If a straight stroke and a lion heart could deliver me, 
how soon I should be free 1” she thought. “ He comes too 
late— too late 1” 

Too late ; not alone to unloose her bonds and rend her 
from her jailers, but too late to wake her heart to his, to 
find her life unusurped, to be sufficient for her in the lotus- 
dream of love. 

The step of a monk was heard without as one of the 
brethren passed to fetch water from a well that was built 
under the shadow of a few cypress-trees some score yards 
from the convent. She left the barred casement, signing 
her lover toward the deep shade where the blackness of 
overhanging rocks made a refuge into which not even the 
noon-rays could penetrate. 

He comprehended and obeyed the gesture to secrecy 
and silence ; his heart was beating to suffocation, his blood 
felt on fire, wretchedness and rapture rioted together in 
him. He had found her 1 So much ^as mercy ; but she 
was in the gripe of those who never spared ; she was in 
the power of those who never unloosed their prey; the 
battalions of an army could scarce avail to wrench her 
from the united hate of Bourbon and of Rome He knew 
it ; he knew that he was but one man against the whole 
force of a government and a hierarchy, but the Border bold- 
ness in him rose the higher for that ; the reckless romance 


339 


“RIEN que toi.” 

of the old Spanish Paladins that slept in his blood awak- 
ened as wildly as it ever awakened in the comrades of 
Campeador or the knights of Ponce de Leon. 

“ I will deliver her, or die for her 1” he swore in his 
throat : and he had never yet broken an oath. 

Forcing the dog to quietude, he drew back from the 
monastery into the shade of the stunted cypresses, and 
threw his lines into a lake-like pool that lay at the foot of 
the rocks: an angler’s pursuit went well enough with his 
barcarolo's dress. The water was reedy, yellow, stagnant 
in places, with islets of river grasses, in which water-fowl 
herded by thousands; but the care of the monks, who 
made their sole repasts from its treasuries, kept it well 
stocked with fish, and in a brief time he landed both dace 
and roach, though his strong wrists trembled as they had 
never done when a Highland salmon had dragged him miles 
down the length of a moorland river in a wrestling duel 
that lasted from noon till evening. 

The monk, returning with his buckets- from the well, 
saw the sacrilegious raid upon the heaven-dedicated food, 
and as the angler had relied on, drew near him in wrath 
and in rebuke. 

“Nay, good father,” said Erceldoune, lifting the fish to 
him, “ I am an idle fellow ; grudge me not a chance of do- 
ing a trifle for Holy Church. I am more used, may be, 
than your brethren to filling a creel quickly. ” 

“ My son, you are welcome to our charity, ” replied the 
monk, a little confused at finding a robber offer him so will- 
ingly the spoils. “AIM meant was, that of a truth, such 
varlets and ruffians poach on the waters that we are obliged 
to guard them something strictly. You have a supple 
wrist and a marvelous strength ; we,” added the friar, with 
a sigh of envy, “ angle all day sometimes, and catch no- 
thing.” 

“ Let me fish for you, father,” said Erceldoune. His 
heart throbbed with hope and dread as he preferred a re- 
quest on which all his future fate would hang ; but he had 
control enough to speak carelessly, and his Neapolitan 
accent was so perfect that the monk never doubted his 
country. “Let me fish for you; and give me in recom- 
pense a night or two’s lodging. I shall be well paid.” 


340 


ID ALTA. 


“ You arc poor, my son V 7 

“ Poor enough.” 

“ And a wanderer ?” 

U I have been a wanderer all my life.” 

“ In truth ? You are a fine fellow, and if you really 
want the Church’s alms ” 

The Cistercian hesitated ; a monastery could scarce re- 
fuse its charity, yet the orders of the superior were strict 
to treat all strangers with circumspection, and, if possible, 
to admit none. 

“ See here, father,” said Erceldoune, rapidly. “ I want 
no man’s alms, lay or clerical; but if you like to strike a 
bargain, here is one. You are not much of sportsmen, I 
fancy; now I have all that lore by heart. I am a wild 
barcarolo, but I know none could beat me in river-craft or 
in shooting. You have ospreys and cormorants in these 
sedges that eat half the fish in the lake ; you have wild 
swans that would make you savory messes to sicken you 
forever of maize and of lentils; you have shoals of small 
fresh-water fish that I will snare by thousands in my nets, 
and, salted, they will last you the whole winter through ; — 
let me work for you on the water, and give me in payment 
a lodging for myself and my dog. I will warrant you you 
shall have the best of the bargain.” 

His voice shook a little with an eagerness he could not 
repress ; the monk, a comely, good-humored, elderly man 
from the Umbrian marshes, a poor brother who did servile 
offices, and was at once porter and angler and hewer of 
wood and drawer of water for the monastery, felt his eyes 
glisten and his lips taste savory things as he thought of 
the wild swans in a potage, and his own labors lightened 
by the stalwart arm and the fearless skill of this adventurer. 
He looked a moment curiously in Erceldoune’s face ; its 
frank, bold, proud features won his trust instantly, as they 
won the trust of all who looked on them; he glanced 
longingly at the fowl-filled sedges. 

“ Wait a moment, my son. I have no power to grant 
your request myself, but I will go speak with the almoner, 
and see what we can do. If the Father Superior will 
listen to your wish, I shall be glad enough for one, for 
Holy Mary knows it is hard work and thankless to find 


“rien que toi.” 341 

food for seventy hungry mouths and lean stomachs in these 
barren lands. Wait a second, and I will be back.” 

He heaved up the water-buckets, and went his way with 
bent shoulders and plodding steps. Erceldoune stood by 
the lake-side, with his eyes fastened on the barred loop- 
hole whence the eyes of the sovereign of his life had looked 
down on him. He thought he saw the gleam of her hair 
in the shadow on high ; he thought she gazed on him, 
though for both their sakes she dared not do so openly ; 
he felt his cheek change color like a woman’s ; he felt his 
limbs tremble as with a woman’s tremor ; — all chance of 
aid to her, of deliverance for her, rested on this one hazard 
he had tried of obtaining entrance to the convent that was 
her prison-house. 

It seemed to him an eternity while the monk was absent; 
anxiety made his eyes blind and his head swim as he saw 
the brother at last returning ; — if his request were denied ! 
if his disguise were penetrated ! The first words he heard 
made him feel giddy with their joy. 

“ My son, be it as you will,” said the monk ; “ and I 
pray you kill a swan quickly. The Father Superior is 
pleased to grant your prayer ; and we will lodge you and 
give you food, if you will shoot and fish and labor in the 
marshes, as you have said, till our buttery be stocked and 
our waters be well netted.” 

Erceldoune bent his head, so that the rush of vivid joy 
that flushed his face should not betray him. 

“ I will labor for you, father, night and day if you will,” 
he said, briefly. 

Would he not have labored like a galley-slave through 
summer drought and winter chills if, by his labor, he could 
have bought one smile from her or spared her a moment’s 
pang ! Then, without more words, he loaded, fired, and 
brought down a wild swan on the wing. 

“ Chee-e-e 1” murmured the Cistercian, ruffling the 
snowy plumage and thinking longingly of the savory stew 
that would vary their refectory fare that night, while he 
stared at the barcarolo as at a stranger from some un- 
known world. “You are a wonderful shot, my friend. If 
you go on like that, we shall have the best of the bargain, 
as you said, for you will find but sorry lodgment with us. 
Can you sleep on a shake-down of dry grass ?” 


342 


IDALIA. 


“ I have slept on bare earth and bare decks many a time 
before now.” 

“ Truly ? Yet you look of noble blood ?” 

“Good blood is scant use if our fortunes be low.” 

“Ah 1 You have fallen on evil days ?” 

“Very evil.” 

“And you were of proud stock once ?” 

“ Good father, I thought in the eyes of the Church all 
men were equal.” 

He spoke curtly, to rid himself of the Cistercian’s 
restless curiosity, and flinging his fishing-shirt open at the 
breast, he set himself to fixing the stakes and the nets at 
the head of the great pool. Every sort of wood and water 
lore had been familiar to him from his earliest boyhood ; 
every secret of the loch and heather he had learnt from 
the days of childhood. With all the skill and strength 
>hat were in him he went to the toil of working for the 
monastery fare, of reaping such a harvest from the marshes 
and the sedges and the lakes as should make the brethren 
give him lodging with favoring cordiality and without 
questions. He worked like a slave, in the scorch of the 
Italian sky, conscious of no fatigue, sensible of no pain ; 
ae worked for her, and on him her eyes might rest from 
her prison-chamber. It gave him a Samson’s force, an 
Indian’s patience. Wading knee deep through the pools, 
ne stretched his nets across the head of the water, as he 
bad known the poachers to do many a night across the 
weir of Highland rivers. Afraid of wasting such powder 
and shot as he had with him, he made a sling from a strip 
of his sash, and slew with unerring aim the wild teal that 
flocked among the osiers, till they were flung in scores on 
to the arid banks. He mowed down the reeds where the 
fish-destroying birds were sheltered, so that they should 
haunt the monastery waters no more, and bore the rushes 
in great sheaves to land. He labored without rest, and 
doing the work of twenty men, in the full downpour of the 
vertical heat, and all through the length of the day, while 
his friend the Umbrian brother sat luxuriously, with folded 
hands, staring at him like an owl lazily blinking in the 
sunlight. 

He labored without ceasing, and with a hot joy at his 


343 


“men que toi.” 

heart ; afar, where the gray walls towered, the eyes of 
Idalia watched him, and with sunset he would have earned 
the right to sleep under the roof that made her prison. 
It sufficed, with his high hope and his high courage, to 
give him almost happiness. He could not believe that love 
like his would ever be powerless to defend and to release 
her. 

All through the long day he worked unweariedly among 
the reedy waters, under the frowning shadow of the mon- 
astery-crowned rocks. And from her cell she gazed on 
him ; on the bold heroic cast of the head, and the sun- 
warmed brow from which the waves of hair were dashed ; 
gazed on him where, under the cypress shadows, through 
the sear rushes, through the sullen waters in the yellow 
glare, he toiled as peasants toil, for her — for her, though 
she had bidden him forsake even her memory forever, 
though she had told him that suffering alone could be his 
portion through her. 

Out of the gloom and silence of her stone-locked cage 
she gazed down on him at his labor through the long hot 
hours of the southern summer day, and her eyes were heavy 
with a regretful languor, her lips parted with a sigh of 
weariness. 

“ Too late !” she thought — “too late !” 

The sun sank down, a globe of red flame in an angry 
sky ; the day was done, and with it the day’s travail. 
More had been gathered in it out of the wastes around 
than the laggard tempers of the slothful brethren gathered 
in a month. Erceldoune stooped eagerly, and drank long 
draughts of thin crimson wine out of a half gourd-rind 
that the Umbrian monk held to him, looking at him the 
while with a curious, compassionate, wondering, envying 
glance. 

“You are tired, my son? Ah! what limbs, what 
strength ! Come within ; you shall sup with us, and have 
such a dormitory as we can give you. Bring the great 
beast too, if there be no danger in him ; eertes, he is a 
giant like you.” 

Erceldoune, as he lifted his head from the wine, felt his 
face as flushed as the stormy sunset light that fell on it ; a 
wild, senseless joy was on him — he should be within the 


ID ALIA. 


Mi 

walls tliat held her. He laid his hand on the hound’s 
collar, with a gesture to silence well enough understood by 
the animal, and followed mutely the brother. 

Jagged precipitous flights of steps, rough hewn in the 
rock itself, led up to the monastery. The entrance-door 
was a low-browed iron-studded arched barrier of oak, im- 
pregnable as granite. It yielded slowly, unwillingly, with 
a grating jar as the monk pushed it open. 

u Enter, my son.” 

Erceldoune stooped, and passed through it into the 
vaulted stone passage-way within, dark as twilight ; the 
door swung weightily back to its place, the great bolts 
rolled into their sockets, the dying day and the living 
world were alike shut out. Thus far one desire of his 
heart had fulfilled itself ; he shared her prison-house with 
Idalia. 

“This way, my son,” said the Umbrian, as he turned 
down a tortuous vaulted passage which led to the monks’ 
dormitories, small stone cells one in another, with dried 
grasses shaken down, as he had said, for pallets, and the 
moisture dripping from the naked walls. The Cistercians 
of this place were very poor ; and Giulio Villafior loved 
vicarious mortification, and was very stringent on his 
monks’ asceticism and devotion, visiting the slightest laxity 
with a fearful rigor. 

The poor brother, at whose girdle hung the huge keys 
of the ecclesiastical fortress, motioned to one of the little 
chambers. 

“ This is yours, my son. I will come to you in half an 
hour. We sup then in the refectory.” 

Erceldoune, left in solitude, closed his door and drew 
its massive bolt ; then stripping off his clothes, dashed the 
cold water that stood in a pitcher over him, rearranged his 
fisher-dress as best he could, slung the pistols again in his 
sash, dropped beside the dog on the hay, and let his head 
sink on his hands. He was beneath the same roof with 
her ; the knowledge made his heart beat thickly, and his 
temples throb. But — how to save her ? 

It would be as dangerous to wrench her from the jaws of 
the Church as to rend an antelope from a panther’s jaws 
and talons. Yet his teeth ground together under the 


“ RIEN QUE T0I.” 3*5 

sweeping darkness of his beard, his hand felt for the butts 
of his belt-pistols. “ I can die with her at least,” he 
thought, “and send some of her foes to damnation first.” 

His love was too fervent and too true not to be pagan 
in its longing and his vengeance. 

The half hour soon passed as he sat lost in thought, 
feverish, tempestuous, conflicting; the Umbrian brother 
came to him. 

“ Our supper is ready, my brother ; it is richer than 
common, thanks to your woodcraft and your angling.” 

Erceldoune followed him, leaving the hound at guard. 

A long arched stone corridor led to the refectory, a 
desolate, dimly-lit hall of the same rough-hewn stone, with 
a few feeble oil lamps flickering in the great sea of gloom. 
The board was simply spread with fried fish and a sim- 
mering soup, in which the wild swan and some of the 
water-fowls were stewed with lentils and capsicums. Some 
seventy monks sat round it, breaking black bread, and 
scenting longingly though with downcast eyes and im- 
mutable lips the unwonted savor of the fare. As his ring- 
ing steps sounded on the stone floor, the recluses looked 
with a dreary, dull wonder at this man with his superb 
manhood, with his luxuriant beard, and his stalwart build, 
with his mountain freedom of glance and of movement, 
who seemed to bring a draught of wild, strong, fresh 
forest -breeze into the darkness and solitude of their 
prison. 

He made his reverence gravely to the white-haired elder 
whom they pointed out as the Superior, then seated him- 
self at the lower end of the board, and took the food 
proffered him. Many eyes studied him inquisitively, but 
no questions were asked ; an unbroken silence prevailed as 
the meal went on. The Order was sternly ruled — sternly 
in especial when any wayfarer or stranger was present ; it 
had a great fame for sanctity, and that odorous reputation 
went far to cover any whispers that might steal abroad of 
other and less holy uses to which its highest director might 
turn it. “ Great Heaven 1” thought Erceldoune, as he 
glanced down the long table at the close-shaven, silent 
guests that surrounded it, while his hand went instinctively 
to the abundant falling masses of the silken hair that 


346 


IDALIA. 


covered his chest, “can living, breathing men — men in 
their youth and their strength — exist like that?” 

His thoughts swept over the many varying years of his 
own life, so full of color, of peril, of cd venture, of change; 
of wandering in divers lands, of danger in deserts and on 
seas, of pleasure in countless cities, of world- wide range of 
travel, of communion with every nation, of gay nights in 
western palaces, of wild rides through eastern heats; — 
and then men lived like this, while all the earth was free 
to them 1 

He spoke to none of them ; he bore them a* fiery hate 
because they were her priestly jailers, and even so much 
needful reticence as lay in breaking the bread of these men 
under a false semblance, while the intent to deliver their 
captive was hidden in his heart, savored too much of a 
taint like treachery not to be bitter to him, imperative as 
it was in her service, and just as it was in its employ and 
errand. 

To Erceldoune it were far easier to deal a straight swift 
stroke, such as that with which men of his race had felled 
Paynim foe or Southern invader, than to carry through 
anything that involved a touch of what looked to him like 
deception. His life had brought him into many critical 
moments when .silence, acuteness, and caution had been as 
compulsory as hot action and reckless daring ; and he had 
never been found wanting in them. But the rush of a 
lion, the swoop of an eagle, were more his instinct and his 
warfare ; and he chafed feverishly under this part that he 
played for her sake in the Italian monastery. 

The supper was brief ; he had hoped the monks might 
be, as he had known many, laughter-loving riotous breth- 
ren, gossips in their cups, and not averse to heavy liba- 
tions, from whom he might have gleaned some hint or 
knowledge of her. They were not ; a cold, still, harsh 
asceticism brooded over them ; they were chiefly saturnine, 
worn, impassive men, whose faces were chill and unreada- 
ble as masks of stone ; there was nothing to give a sus- 
picion that anything, save the severest form of religious 
devotion and abstinence, reigned there — nothing to hint 
that there was a prisoner within their keeping. There 
was not one from whom he could expect to extract any 


347 


“rien que tot.” 

hope, except the poor porter and water-carrier, on whose 
round jocund face not even the silence and the hard labor 
of his life could impress either spirituality or resignation. 

The monks filed slowly out of the dark, narrow, vaulted 
hall; the Umbrian and one other remained to clear away 
the remnants of the meal. 

“ Will you take this to your dog?” said the priest, as he 
heaped up the remnants. “You did well not to bring 
him here ; the Superior would not have loved so big a 
brute.” 

“Thanks,” said Erceldoune, as he took some broken 
food ; “ and do you come to my cell, good father, I have 
something more cheering in my flask than your water and 
goat’s milk.” 

The Umbrian’s eyes glistened with delight, though a 
shadow of grievous disappointment stole quickly over his 
features. 

“Another night, my son — to-morrow night I shall be 
free,” he whispered. “ This evening I must attend the 
offices. You know your way back, and you can undress 
by moonlight? We have no other light, save in the 
chapel.” 

Erceldoune, wearily enough, nodded assent, and with a 
brief word of thanks paced through the long passages to 
his dormitory. He could do no more ; he must wait and 
watch, and be content that he was near her. He could 
not tell in what part of the building she was lodged ; he 
must await time to learn that, and learn the means to 
reach her. With the morrow he might bribe, or stupefy 
the Umbrian with drink, till he reached liis confidence; 
for the present there was nothing for it, without exciting 
suspicion, except to remain in the sleeping-place allotted 
him, and labor afresh for them with the dawn. 

The little slit, unglazed and narrow as a hand’s breadth, 
through which the luminous silver moon poured down, 
was high above his head ; he swung himself upward and 
looked out : the waters and marshy plains, with the dark 
belt of cypress afar off, slept calmly in the white and glist- 
ening night ; all was very still, only broken by the cry of a 
water-bird, the rush of an aziola, or the hoot of an owl. 
As he gazed, the outer bolt of the stone door of his cell 


348 


LDALIA. 


was drawn sharply and swiftly ; he dropped to his feet 
with an oath. 

“ Do not blaspheme, my son,” said the Umbrian’s voice 
through a chink. “ It is only our custom with strangers.” 

He was a prisoner for the whole length of the summer 
night. 

Well — the prison was hers; it was something to 
share it. 

He undressed, laid his pistols ready loaded by his side, 
drank thirstily of the cool water with which the pitcher 
had been refilled, and threw himself on the dry grasses, 
with his arm flung round the hound’s neck ; they were 
comrades — they were both here to save her. 

He lay long gazing at the glimpse of starry sky that 
gleamed above, while the chimes tolled slowly from the 
bell-tower of the Cistercian monastery, and the moon- 
light poured down on to his mighty limbs stretched there 
in rest, and the gladiator breadth of the vast uncovered 
chest ; only to know that he was beneath the s^me roof 
with her through the long silent hours, made his brain 
giddy, his heart on fire. 

It was very long before at length a fitful, restless, dreamy 
sleep came to him. 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

LION AND LEOPARD. 

With the first break of the dawn, freed by his Umbrian 
friend, he went back to his work on the waters ; the cool 
long hours were precious for labor, and he desired so to 
gratify and serve them, that the brethren should be loth 
to lose his services. He was than kful # that he was given 
liberty at all with the sunrise. When the bolt of his cell 
had been drawn, a horror of dread had stolen on him that 
his errand was suspected, and that he was trapped, like a 
fox in a keeper’s gins. 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


349 


The morning was balmy, clear, and beautiful; even the 
naked wastes and smoking marshes looked brighter in its 
light, and he went forth with the scythe, and the nets, and 
the lines across his shoulder, and the hound following close 
in his path. He had strapped his gold about his waist, 
and he brought the dog with him. The hound’s eyes 
asked, with as much eloquence as human lips ever framed, 
to be allowed to seek out his mistress; but he was per- 
fectly trained, and he understood at a glance that the time 
for his search of her had not yet come. As Erceldoune 
descended the steep incline of rock-steps, he glanced up at 
the lancet window at which yesterday he had seen the 
woman who was the single thought and idol of his life ; 
she was not there. Though he knew nothing of it, her 
prison-chamber had been changed for one in which there 
was no casement — one to which light and air only strayed 
through by a score of circular holes pierced in the stone- 
work, high above the reach of her gaze; a chamber on 
which no eyes could look, from which no cries could be 
heard. His heart sank at the dark vacancy which was 
alone seen through the bars, whence a few hours before 
her eyes had dwelt on him, from which she had watched 
him all through the length of the previous day. It was 
bitter work so to rein in his impulse, that he did not rush 
blindly into the den where she was hidden, and see what a sure 
shot and a merciless blow could do to free her. He choked 
the longing down as best he could ; he knew there were 
seventy men there who would swing the ponderous gates to 
on him, and shut in with him forever every chance of rescue 
for her ; he knew that the only hope for her, or for himself, 
lay in the course he now pursued ; and he went out to his 
toil. There was abundance both of sport and of labor in 
those wild marshes and ill-preserved, pools to have oc- 
cupied for months one who brought to them the lore and 
the skill of Scottish moorlands, and he returned to them 
with unflagging pertinacity, mowing down the osiers, sling- 
ing the teal, and ^idgeon, and mallards, reckless of season 
so long as they served to fill the monks’ buttery ; stretch- 
ing the nets and thrashing the sedges till the frightened 
fish swam in by the score ; working through hour on hour 
till the Umbrian brought him his mess of breakfast-soup, 

30 


350 


IDALIA. 


and some tough cakes of rye, and sat down beside him 
under the stunted cypresses, gazing with devouring, de- 
lighted eyes at the stores of food laid upon the banks. 

“ Thanks, father; but that is a poor breakfast for either 
of us. See here ; I have done better than you,” said 
Erceldouiie, as he stooped over a fire he had lit with the 
touchwood, and broke the clay covering off two succulent 
water birds and half a dozen dainty trout, that he had 
baked in a sportsman’s fashion, practiced many a time in 
Canadian woods, and Kansas wilds, and Thuringian forests, 
and Australian deserts. The eyes of the monk glittered 
with glee ; he dearly loved savory food, and abstinence 
was a sore trial to him. 

“ Eat of them as you will,” said Erceldoune, as he laid 
them on the slab of rock that served as a table. “ They 
are better than rye bread, at any rate ; and if you fear the 
brethren, not a soul can see you here. You seem very 
strict in your Order ?” 

The Umbrian sighed, and shook his little brown bullet 
head, while he betook himself to the precious banquet in 
silence. 

“ Yet you have a woman in your holy walls ?” 

He spoke abruptly ; it was fearful to him to speak of 
her, and he could have better loved to force the answer 
out by a sterner mode than words. 

The Umbrian started, and flushed guiltily. 

“ Nay, my son, you make a strange error. By all the 
saints of the calendar, nothing feminine ever ” 

“ Spare your perjuries, father. I saw her yonder.” 

He motioned his head backward to the frowning wall 
behind them ; his pulses beat like sledge-hammers as he 
spoke. 

The Umbrian hung his head, and hastily gobbled up a 
liver wing. 

“A delusion of the eye — a snare of the senses, my son. 
Maybe your thoughts run too much upon women.” 

Erceldoune swept the board bare of all the unlasted 
fare. 

“ By my faith, you are a good comrade. I have brandy 
that will make you dream yourself in paradise, and we 
would have had a carouse with it to-night ; but since you 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


35J 


tell me such lies, when my own eyes saw her yonder, you 
shall have no drop of the cognac as long as you live, and 
every fish I have heaped on these banks I will fling back 
in the lakes again, and leave you to fill your own buttery 
as you best may !” 

The Umbrian, terrified and aghast at what he had lost, 
seized the ends of his companion’s sash imploringly: 

“ Oh, my son ! do not be so rash. Set down the good 
food; to waste it is a sin. You did see her; you are 
right. But, for pity’s sake, never breathe it.” 

“ What is she, then ?” asked Erceldoune, as he gave 
back the birds and trout, that had served him so well, into 
the eager hands of the monk. “And why should you deny 
it ? except that priests always deny any truth.” 

“ She is a prisoner, and a rebel ; and you should not 
blaspheme.” 

“ Whose prisoner ?” 

“ The king’s, my son.” 

“The king’s ! Has he no prisons of his own, then, that 
he must borrow your convent ?” 

The Umbrian hesitated ; he was sore afraid to answer 
the question, but he was more immediately afraid that his 
impetuous questioner should sweep his meal away again. 

“ Monsignore Yillaflor is interested in her recovery to* 
the One Faith, my son,” he said, slowly and unwillingly. 

“ Giulio Yillaflor 1” The words leaped from his lips ere 
he knew they were spoken ; the blood rushed into his face, 
his hands clinched ; the name confirmed his worst horror, 
his worst dread. He knew the temper and the repute of 
the mighty Italian ; he shivered where he stood in the hot 
sun. 

“ What do you know of our holy father in God, my 
son ?” 

Erceldoune turned his eyes full on him. 

“ What do you know ?” 

The other flushed shamefacedly; he was an honest peas- 
ant in his way, to whom the mask of sanctity was very 
irksome ; and the great ecclesiastic, and the uses to which 
the monastery was put, had alike cruelly gone against his 
simple instincts of a just life. 


352 


IPALIA. 


“ You must not question me, ray son ; I know nothing- 
nothing save to obey the little I am ever told.” 

“ What are you told of this captive, then ?” 

“That she is a skeptic and a revolutionist; a very evil 
and fatal woman.” 

“And his Holiness of Yillaflor, out of his divine love, 
wishes to reclaim her into the bosom of the Church !” 

The words were hot and acrid as they were hurled 
through his set teeth : it was all he could do to keep any 
chain on them. 

The Umbrian winced under their sting. 

“ Surely, my son. It would be well that she should be 
reclaimed. But, of a truth ” 

“ What ? Can a priest speak truth ?” 

“ Hush, my son ; you must not be so bitter upon the ap- 
pointed of God. I was going to say” — the monk played 
restlessly with the savory bones he had been crunching, 
and the color burnt in his yellow cheek, as his voice sank 
low, and his eyes glanced around furtively — “ whether it 
was sorcery given her by the Evil One or no I cannot tell, 
but there was such a look in her eyes — ah, Madonna, she 
has a fearful beauty 1 — that when they bade me scourge 
her for contumacy, the lash dropped from my hands; I 
* was as one paralyzed. I could not. I could not 1” 

With a cry as though the scourge came on him, cutting 
into the livid flesh, Erceldoune sprang to his feet; his 
hands fell on the Cistercian’s shoulders, swaying him to 
and fro. 

“ Scourged her ? — scourged her ? O God ! they never 
dared ” 

“ I dared not,” muttered the Umbrian, sorely in fear ; 
“ they were bitter upon me, but they did not force it — 
then. She will have the punishment to-morrow if she 
have not yielded ” 

“ Yielded to what?” 

“ Yielded to the persuasions of the Church, my son.” 

Erceldoune flung him off wjth a force that made the 
Umbrian’s blood run cold. 

“ Yielded to the passions of Giulio Yillaflor, you mean ! 
You hell-hounds ! — you fiends !” 

His voice choked in his throat; the muscles of his chest, 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


€553 


where the fishing- shirt was open, swelled convulsively; he 
felt blind with rage and agony ; the monk watched him in 
wonder. 

“ The sight of her beauty beyond those bars has stirred 
you strangely, my son. Verily, she is a sorceress, as they 
say. You feel marvelously for a strange woman.” 

Erceldoune shook in every limb with the effort to con- 
trol what, betrayed, must betray both her and him. 

“ That she is a woman, and you are brutes, is enough ! 
What man that had not the heart of a cur could hear such 
infamy and keep his peace ? It is well the lash dropped 
from your hands, or I would have shaken life out of you 
where you stand 1” 

The Umbrian gave a shudder. 

“ Truly you could do it, for you are a son of Anak ! I 
must leave you now ; I am due with the Almoner ; and as 
for that little matter of the brandy, I will come to your 
cell after supper, if you be still in the mind.” 

He made his way back with speed, anxious to get out 
of reach of this unchained lion ; and Erceldoune stood 
alone in the hot sun-scorch, with shivers of fire and of ice, 
turn by turn, in his veins. 

Whatever could be done for her must be done swiftly, or 
it would be too late. 

Across the pitiless clearness of the transparent air there 
was alone in the arid wastes about him the figure of a pif- 
feraro, a mere lad, singing a barcarolle, whose burden was 
borne musically and wildly over the marshes as he toiled 
on his way with his monkey on his shoulder. With light- 
ening quickness, Erceldoune, keeping out of the sight of 
the monastery casements, waded through shallow pools 
and dashed through thickets of osier, till he reached the 
boy, a bright-eyed, bright- witted Savoyard, with a dirty, 
tattered sheepskin for clothing, and a little ape for a com- 
rade, and a light childish heart that made him happier 
than a king. Erceldoune glanced at him, and saw intelli- 
gence and frankness both in the arch, brown ruddy face of 
the little bohemian ; he stopped him as the boy was leap- 
ing from tuft to tuft of the rank grass that studded the 
shaking quagmires, and stretched his hand out with a 
broad gold coin. 

X 


30 * 


354 


ID ALIA. 


“ Had you ever so much in your life ?” 

The Savoyard opened wide his keen, dancing black eyes. 

“Never! Of a truth, signor barcarolo , if that is the 
fish you angle out of these pools, your craft’s a thriving 
one !” 

“You shall get just such fish yourself if you choose. 
Will you go on an errand for me ? You shall have this 
coin as you start, if you will, and ten like it when you 
come back and show me the errand is done.” 

The pifferaro stretched out his little tanned hand. 

“Give it here,” he said, laconically. “The errand is 
done.” 

Erceldoune tossed him the gold. 

“ The errand is this. Do you know Ferratino ?” 

The boy nodded assent. 

“ Go thither, then ; quick as a lapwing, straight as a 
crow flies. Run, as if you ran for your life. Take a 
paper I will give you to the villa, and say it is for his Ex- 
cellency the Baron ; he will send word by you, yes or no. 
Bring the word to me here, truly and instantly, and you 
shall have ten of those pieces, I promise you. Can you 
do the distance ? It is far.” 

The Savoyard laughed, his bright eyes all glittering 
with eager zest. 

“ I have done farther for a dozen bajocchi ! You shall 
have your answer as fast as a pigeon could bring it. Give 
me the paper. I shall find you here ?” 

“Yes. On these waters. Wait a second while I write, 
and then be off like the wind.” 

As he spoke, he tore a leaf out of a pocket-book in 
which his circular notes had been sent from the yacht, and 
wrote with its pencil a few rapid lines ; they were simply 
in German : 

“ Dear Anselm, — I am in pressing need. Send me at 
nightfall two of the fastest horses you have ; let some boy 
ride them who cannot speak a word of Italian, and wait 
with them, unseen, in the cypress grove under the mon- 
astery of Taverna — wait all night till he sees me. Do no 
more than I ask, for God’s sake. I know I need not say 
grant my request; our alliance is too old and too siue. 


LION AND LEOPARD. 355 

Forgive all that sounds strange and vague in this, and 
send me simply word, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ by the Savoyard. 

“ Yours ever, 

“FULKE ErCELDCUNE.” 

Men of his temperament make firm and warm friendships 
among men. The Hungarian noble to whom he wrote, 
and who, as he had remembered, occupied a villa some 
dozen miles from the wastes in which he stood, was a gen- 
erous, reckless man of pleasure, who, he knew well, -would 
have done far greater things than this at his entreaty, and 
would have the sagacity to do as he asked, and no more. 
Ernst von Anselm and he had once passed through a mad 
night together on the burning decks of a sir*p in the midst 
of the broad Pacific, when mutiny and drunkenness in a 
Lascar crew had added their horrors to the pandemonium ; 
and together, back to back, against a legion of devils, and 
in the red-hot glare of leaping flames, had sent their bul- 
lets through the ringleaders’ brains, and saved the vessel 
alike from fire and from anarchy. From that hour they 
had been friends, true and close and tried, in that noble 
friendship of brethren, which is worth all the love of 
women. 

The little pifferaro, flinging his ape over his shoulder, 
where it gripped a sure hold, darted off, over the dreary 
plain, as he had promised, as fast as a pigeon could fly: 
that broad gold coin locked in his hand, and the promise 
of ten more like it, lent him the speed of a desert pony. 
“ I shall go back a millionnaire to my people I” thought 
the child in his glee. There was hardly so much money 
in the whole of the little hamlet that had given him birth, 
where it nestled in a sleepy hollow under the brown hills of 
Savoy. 

Erceldoune looked after him a second, — the careless 
child was a frail little basket-boat to launch on such stormy 
waters weighted with the fate of two lives ! Then he went 
back to the work of the monastery, laboring all through 
the noon-heat among the sedges and the still shallow yel- 
low lagunes, working as men only work when in that ardor 
of physical toil, that restless bodily exertion, they give vent 
to the thoughts which, if they paused tc muse a moment, 


856 


ID ALIA. 


would unman and madden them. He felt as if the hours 
would never move; the sun seemed to stand still; the 
blazing radiance of the day had a sickening oppression ; — 
what might she not be bidden to suffer in it I 

He knew the temper of Giulio Villaflor, that leopard of 
the velvet skin and of the unsparing fangs. lie shuddered 
as he looked on the rugged silent pile, that kept her 
chained for such a tyrant. He had never fancied that the 
world could hold such agony as those burning, endless, 
intolerable hours brought him, as he plunged down eagerly 
into the coolness of the waters to chill the torture in him, 
and labored to kill thought under the burden of corporeal 
fatigue, under the fever of ceaseless activity. 

The day grew on ; noon came and passed ; the glow of 
light lay clear and golden over the plain and the breadth 
of the sheeted water; the hours were tolled monotonously 
from the campanila, ever and again the drone of the 
monks’ voices rising in regular diapason, in chant or office, 
swelled through the narrow apertures of their chapel case- 
ments, and echoed with melancholy rise and fall over the 
silence. When he heard it, deadlier oaths than his lips had 
ever breathed were hurled over the slumbering pools at the 
priestly formulas that sheltered a Nero’s cruelties, a Bor- 
gia’s lusts. Once or twice a peasant or a muleteer passed 
across the horizon line : otherwise there was nothing to 
break the eternal sameness of the glittering sunlight, the 
sear country, the cypress points cutting so sharply against 
the intense blue of the sky. He knew what men had felt 
who had lost their reason through a captivity that made 
them dwell in one unending solitude — look on one un- 
changing scene. 

The deep radiance of color that precedes the sunset was 
just flushing earth and sky, as the shrill hoot of an owl’s 
note pierced his ear — a night-bird’s cry in the sunshine. 
He guessed at once that it was a signal of the little piffe- 
raro, and followed it. Under the reeds, some half mile or 
less from the monastery, the boy was crouched, panting 
like a tired dog, but glowing with life and zest and eager- 
ness as he lifted his hot brown face. 

“ I have done it,” he cried, with all a child’s exultation. 

Here is your answer — written. Stay here, lest the crows 


LION AND LEOPARD. 35J 

yonder should spy on us. Let priests smell gold, and it’s 
all up with him who owns it.” 

Erceldoune took the paper and read it, lying there under 
the shelter of the sedges. It was in German ; the Baron 
was from home, but an old lackey, who had chanced to be 
the first to greet the Savoyard, seeing an open scroll, and, 
pressed by the boy’s urgency, had read it, had hesitated at 
first what to do in his master’s absence, but, knowing hour 
well Anselm loved the writer, had known he should run no 
risk by compliance, and might by refusal risk much dis- 
pleasure. He wrote now in reply, with sagacity and fore- 
sight, promising that the horses should be in waiting at 
nightfall with a lad to hold them, and that as they would 
be something worn by the transit, another pair should be 
in readiness at the gates of Ferratino in case Erceldoune’s 
errand should bear him near, which in all likelihood it 
might, since all things must pass by there to reach the 
road to the shore. 

His hand shook with joy as he read, and scattered the 
old man’s tremulously-written characters in fragments lest 
they should tell tales. So far the means for flight were 
secured, could her freedom be compassed. He had not 
much gold about him, but he gave double the fee to the 
little pifferaro, while the child stared in amaze at the 
twenty shining yellow pieces. He caught them greedily, 
yet when he had them he was half stupefied with the enor- 
mity of his possessions. 

“ The pastor, and the bailiff, and the innkeeper never 
had more than that all put together !” he murmured, his 
thoughts drifting to the village of his birth, with its little 
steeple hidden under chestnut leaves, and its mild-eyed 
herds browsing on the green breadths between the rocks. 
“ That is no barcarole*; and, whatever the mischief is, I 
will be bound there is a woman in it,” considered the 
shrewd little lad as he went on his way, the gold safe in 
the bosom of his sheepskin shirt. 

With the dead mallards and teal flung over his shoulder, 
and with a great osier-basket of fish filled to overflowing, 
Erceldoune passed, unsummoned, from the lake side up the 
rock, and to the monastery gates. He thought they might 
make question of letting him enter for a second night’s 


358 


IDALIA. 


lodging, and without entrance all hope of her rescue was 
ended. The Umbrian, however, who through the grating 
saw the abundance brought in for the larder, admitted him 
instantly, with many praises of his industry and adorations 
of his skill. 

“You have a heavy door there ?” said Erceldoune, 
turning to glance at the ponderous mass of iron-clamped 
oak that swung slowly behind him. 

“Ah — heavy indeed !” sighed the Cistercian, as he 
stooped to draw the huge bolts, which were only drawn 
stiffly and with effort into their sockets. “It is heavy 
enough, but it is these are the misery.” 

“ These ? I will soon make them run smoother. I have 
something of a smith’s skill. Fetch me a file and a little 
oil.” 

The Umbrian fetched them gladly, marveling what 
manner of man this was who knew every craft under the 
sun. A little whde, and the rusted iron ran noiselessly 
and smoothly in their massive channels; the monk’s lament 
had given him an opportunity more precious than any 
other could have been in that moment, and in easing the 
run of the bolts for the gatekeeper’s indolence, he paved 
the way to a facile exit by night from the monastery, if by 
any means he could also obtain the great key that swung 
from the Umbrian’s girdle. 

“You have a wonderful science, my son,” said the Cis- 
tercian, with musing amaze. “You can do all things that 
you turn your hand to, it seems !” 

“I have lived in many countries and with many men.” 

“You must have been more than a mere barcarolo, my 
son ?” 

“ I told you I have been a * wanderer’ from my birth,” 
said Erceldoune, with a smile at the play on the Celtic 
meaning of his nationality. “ The career is a bad one for 
gold, but it is the best in the world, I fancy, for learning 
self-help and other men’s virtues.” 

“ But you must learn much vice, too, my son ?” 

Erceldoune shrugged his shoulders. 

“What of that ? Vice is a good teacher too, in its way, 
and one must take the warp with the woof.” 

“ But, you know, one cannot touch pitch, my son, and 
keep undefiled.” 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


359 


Erceldoune laughed a little. 

“ Good father, where is the man that ever did keep so ? 
And as for that, the pitch will not stay long unless the 
surface be ready for it. But, for Heaven’s sake, chatter 
no more ; I love speech little at any time, and now — I am 
famished.” 

“ Truly you have earned your supper; and — as for that 
little matter of brandy ? I have not tasted a drop since I 
was in Naples, seven seasons ago 1” 

“All right. I have the best cognac in a flask here ; if 
you come to my cell after supper, you shall be heartily wel- 
come to a draught of it.” 

The monk’s eyes sparkled with glee ; he nodded a hasty 
assent, and, relieving his guest of the fish and the birds, 
took him for the second time to the refectory. The same 
silence, the same rigor, the same fare prevailed ; the same 
double line of lean, immutable, saturnine, emaciated faces 
were in the dim light of the stone hall ; the same swift up- 
ward glance was cast on him as he entered ; the same ab- 
stracted severity of repose was observed throughout the 
meal. He had no wish to break it ; only for her sake could 
he so far restrain the hatred in him toward the men who 
were her torturers and her captor’s tools, as to share their 
bread, justly as he had earned it, and to sit in such semblance 
of amity with them as lay in this compulsory companion- 
ship. Some among them noted that there was a dark 
shadow on the strange barcarolo’s face that had not been 
there so deeply on the previous day, and the monk nearest 
him heard a heavy oath muttered under the waves of his 
beard when the blessing before the refection was chanted ; 
it was a curse on those who covered the lusts of a velvet- 
voiced priest with the savor of sanctity, with the odor of 
rituals. Often, moreover, his passionate eyes flashed over 
the countenances around him, seeking to read by instinct 
which among them was the brute who had dared bid the 
lash be raised against her: had he known, scarce every 
memory of the prudence and the abstinence needful for her 
sake would have availed to chain back his arm from a blow 
that would have felled the offender level with the flags of 
the stone floor. 

The meal ended, a fresh torture waited him ; the Supe- 


3G0 


IDALIA. 


rior summoned him to the head of the table, and held a long 
converse with him, the rambling verbosity of old age com- 
bined, in the incessant vagaries of his interrogation, with 
the subtle veiled promptings of curiosity and cunning. 
There was that in the bearing and the glance of the stranger 
they harbored which made the priests uneasily suspect that 
this was too bold a lion for their episcopal lord to welcome 
were he aware of the shelter they gave. Erceldoune saw 
the suspicion, and saw that he must allay it, or all hope of 
sufficient freedom for the purpose he held would be forever 
denied him. With an effort which cost him far more than 
any physical toil or bodily strain could have ever done, he 
forced himself into the part it was imperative to play. Lie 
he would not, not even for her ; and reserve, he saw, 
would confirm all the doubts rising in the breasts of his 
jailers and auditors ; he cast himself into a bolder ven- 
ture. “ These men,” he reckoned, with a swift glance over 
them, “ must be of two classes only — those who have for- 
saken the world, and those who have never known it ; to 
hear of it will enchain equally those for whom it is a lost 
land and those to whom it is an unknown one.” On that 
rapid inference he acted. In answer to the Superior’s 
questions he told his life frankly ; changing it in little, 
save that they deemed his travel had been the travel of a 
restless bohemian — a man poor enough to have been glad 
at times to serve before the mast. 

Though he was averse to many words usually, he could 
speak with a vivid and impressive eloquence when the fire 
of it was struck alight in him. lie forced himself to speak 
so here. He answered, as one who would tell his adven- 
tures, without pressure or concealment; and after the 
brevity of his previous curt replies, the monks heard the 
picturesque flow of his swift Italian with the same amaze 
with which they regarded the stature, the strength, the 
sinewy limbs, the sweeping beard, and the careless royalty 
of bearing of this athlete, who came among them as though 
to show them all that this manhood, which they had cru- 
cified and buried in their own lives as an unholy and ac- 
cursed thing, might be and might enjoy. His past had 
been full of ever-changing scenes and experiences; hair- 
breadth escapes, desperate dangers, wild adventure, and 


LION AND LEOrARD. 


361 


keen perils, had been continually his portion in the distant 
and intricate missions on which he was sent. A struggle 
of life and death in the heart of Persia had been followed 
by dreamy barbaric luxury and magnificence in the midst 
of Mexican palaces ; a death-ride through Russian snow- 
storms, with the baying pack of starving wolves on his 
track through the whole of a bitter icy night, had been 
succeeded by months of gayety in the capitals of Europe; 
a shipwreck in the midst of the Indian Ocean, with a Malay 
crew ripe for murder, and an open boat living for days on 
tempestuous seas in the glare of a tropic sun, with men 
around him dying like dogs for water, had been effaced 
almost as soon as endured by the brilliant fiery pleasures 
of a volunteer service with the French cavalry in a cam- 
paign against the Arabs, or a desert quest for desert game 
over the wild Libyan tracks in the sultry glories of autumn 
days and nights, by a season’s sojourn in some friend’s 
summer-palace among the roses of Damascus, or in the 
ruby glow of the Nile suns, painting, shooting, swimming, 
boating, finding ever and everywhere the happiness of fear- 
less, fetterless, vivid sense of life, oftentimes nomadic and 
glad in the mere gladness of strength in the desert chief’s 
mere liberty, with 

.... “tlie rick dates yellow’d over with gold-dust divine. 

And the locust’s flesh steep’d in the pitcher, the full draught of 

wine, 

And the sleep in the dried river channel, where bulrushes tell 
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.” 

The memories even of a single year supplied him with a 
thousand sources from which to draw pictures of varied 
scenes, whose recital entranced imperceptibly and uncon- 
sciously first one and then another of his auditors, till the 
whole circle of the monks stood around as men in the East 
will stand around the narrator who tells of far countries 
and of strange fortunes, while the narghile vapors out, and 
the coffee steams fragrantly in the open divan, and the 
grave Mussulmen stroke their beards in silent wonder. 

It entranced them, these recitals of worlds unknown and 
joys as of dangers undreamed of. When he paused, the 
Father Superior pressed him eagerly for more ; those bold, 
terse, picturesque words that drew them sketches of differ- 


3G2 


ID ALIA. 


ent lands and unimagined pleasures with the same rich 
vigorous sweep as that with which his hand would paint 
tropic foliage and mountain outline, the stretch of seas and 
the burning warmth of sun-tanned prairie, held the priestly 
circle spell-bound. Those who had known no existence 
save that of the cloister from their youth up, heard with 
an entranced, stupefied amaze, as children hear tales of 
genii ; those who had come to the cloister only when every 
hope of life had been bruised, and wrung, and killed, heard 
with a terrible pained look of hunger on their faces, as 
exiles hear a strain of melody which brings them back the 
songs of the land they have lost forever. Both alike hung 
on the swift flow of the descriptive words, only more 
warmly colored by the Neapolitan idiom he still employed, 
as on some tale of paradise ; the worn sallow cheeks flushed, 
the deadened lusterless eyes flashed, the dropped veiled 
glance was lifted eagerly, the thin and silent lips were 
parted with rapid breaths, and once a sigh broke from a 
monk still in the years of youth — a sigh so bitter, so in- 
tense in its anguish of vain lament, that a whole broken, 
wasted life seemed spent in it. 

Never again would they be as they had been ere this 
wanderer had come amid them ; through him they saw all 
that they had lost forever. 

He had conquered them. When they parted, and he 
went on his way to his cell, there was not a doubt of him 
lingering in any heart, there was not a man who had one 
thought left with him save of that glory of manhood, that 
splendor of liberty, that beauty of unknown worlds which 
they had voluntarily surrendered and buried from them- 
selves till the death of the grave should release them from 
the death of the monastery. 

“ Come,” he whispered, as he passed the Umbrian, “and 
if you can bring lemons, sugar, and spices with you, you 
shall dream yourself in paradise to-night.” 

“Hush, my dear son ; do not be so profane !” murmured 
the other, while his eyes danced in expectant ecstasy. “ I 
will come, and bring the things, if I can, from the buttery. 
Your tales were beautiful, but I thought the Superior 
would never have let you go !” 

“ Great heaven ! to save my own life I would not stoop 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


363 


to dupe and bribe these brutes as I do for hers !” thought 
Erceldoune, where he leaned on the stone ledge of his cell- 
window awaiting the monk. It was very bitter to him, 
this truce with her enemies, this false play with these eccle- 
siastics. The soldier-like frankness and the proud honesty 
of his nature rebelled irrepressibly at the dissimulation he 
was driven to match them with thus. To lead a charge 
through the heat of battle, as he had done in Mexico and 
Algeria more than once, when the chiefs had been shot 
down, or to imperil his life against all odds in a deadly 
contest with overpowering numbers, as had chanced to him 
in Persian defiles and Argentine revolutions, was far more 
suited to his temper and his instincts than the part that, 
for her sake, fell to him in these cloisters of Taverna. Yet 
played out the part must be, or she would be beyond res- 
cue, beyond hope. 

It was not long before the Umbrian made his stealthy 
entrance, with the treasures of the buttery hidden under 
his frock. 

Erceldoune in silence took the things from him. His own 
flask was large and full of brandy, strong as fire and mel- 
low as oil; be emptied out half the water of his pitcher, 
tossed the whole of the cognac in instead, and with the 
spices, lemons, and sugar, made a fragrant and intoxicating 
drink. The Umbrian, squatted on the dry grasses of the 
bed, watched its preparation with thirsty, devouring eyes. 

“ He will be dead drunk before this is half empty,” 
thought Erceldoune. 

“There, tell me if that is not better than sour wines and 
rancid goat’s milk,” he asked, as he poured some into the 
little drinking horn the monk had brought. It was swal- 
lowed in an ecstasy; the Umbrian had no need to dream 
of paradise ; he was in it the moment the strong, odorous 
draught touched his lips. As fast as he stretched the horn 
out, so fast his host filled it ; the pitcher held more than a 
quart, and Erceldoune scarcely drank himself, though he 
made a feint of so doing; he did not yet know how much 
or how little would be needed to steep the Italian in the 
slumberous intoxication he required to produce. As he 
had imagined, the first few draughts rose straight to the 
brain of the recluse, who, well as he loved it, had not 


364 


IDALIA. 


tasted any alcohol for years; the luscioirs, fiery, highly- 
spiced liquid quickly flushed his face, and whirled his 
thoughts, and loosened his always loquacious tongue ; he 
sat with the jovial content of a Sancho Panza, laughing, 
chattering, heeding very little what replies he had, and 
very rapidly forgetting all things except the tender of his 
horn for its replenishing. Erceldoune sought first to 
make him garrulous, so that he might glean intelligence 
from his drunken verbiage. The Umbrian’s idle tergiver- 
sation of speech soon wandered off to the captive of their 
clerical bondage — wandered to such ardent maudlin ecsta- 
sies on the subject of her beauty, that his hearer suffered 
tortures as he listened perforce to the profanation. Ercel- 
doune flung himself down on the flag floor, resting on his 
elbow, in such enforced stillness as he could command, 
while the rambling fervor of the gluttonous Brother dese- 
crated her name and catalogued her charms ; happily, the 
drinker was too giddy with his potations to notice the 
shudder that every now and then at his hottest epithets of 
descriptive admiration shook his listener’s limbs, or the 
flash that darted over him from his hearer’s eagle eyes 
when he betrayed, in his unconscious loquacity, the pur- 
pose of her imprisonment in the Cistercian sanctuary. 

It needed no questions to elicit all he knew; the brandy 
fumes rising over his brain undid all caution it had ever 
been taught, and spread out all its shreds of knowledge as 
a peddler spreads his wares. Erceldoune heard enough to 
convulse him w r ith horror as he was stretched there on the 
naked stone, w r ith the luster of the Italian night finding its 
way dimly through the aperture above ; — enough to know 
that he must rescue her to-night, or never. 

“And I will tell you more,” hiccoughed the monk, 
laughing low and cunningly, too blind with drink to have 
much knowledge left of whom he spoke to or of where he 
w r as. “ Monsignore comes to-night — he often visits us, 
you know ; we are his special children, and it has a fair 
odor for so great a man to leave the world for such holy, 
rigorous retirement I” 

“ To-night 1” 

Erceldoune sprang to his feet as a lion springs from its 
lair ; the priest’s villainous chuckle rang like a rattlesnake 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


365 


in his ear ; in his cups the Umbrian was but an auimal — a 
very low one to boot — and the better instincts which had 
moved him when the lash had dropped from his hand were 
drowned and dead. 

“Ay, to-night !” laughed the monk, while his head hung 
on one side, and his eyes closed with the fatuous cunning 
of intoxication ; “ he comes for the last time — do you 
mark me? — for the last time !” 

The oath that shook the stone walls thrilled even 
through the mists of drink and the imbecility of his dulled 
brain, as it was hurled from his hearer’s lips ; an agony 
was in it such as mere grief never spoke yet. The Um- 
brian, sobered by it for the moment, shuddered and strove 
to rise, looking about him with blind, terrified eyes. 

“ What have I said ? What have I done ?” he mut- 
tered, piteously. “Ah, Jesu 1 Monsignore — Monsignore !” 

And with that last dread name on his lips he fell back 
stupefied, rocking himself to and fro, and sobbing like a 
child. 

Erceldoune neither saw nor heard him ; he stood like a 
statue, his hands clinched, his face dyed crimson, the 
black veins swollen on his forehead and his throat, his 
breath caught in savage, stifled gasps, his bared chest 
heaving like the flanks of a snared animal. 

“ To-night ! — to-night !” 

The words rattled in his chest with a curse that would 
have chilled even the bold blood of his mighty rival. 

The Umbrian sat motionless, staring at him with dis- 
tended, senseless eyes ; he was filled with a great terror, 
but the terror was vague, and his mind seemed to swim in 
vapor. Erceldoune cast one glance at him, and by sheer 
instinct forced the vessel, still half filled with the liquid, 
into his hands. 

“Drink!” he said, fiercely; “drink, and be a beast at 
once.” 

The monk, with whom there was but one sense left, that 
of desire for the alcohol that destroyed him, seized it 
thirstily, and drank — drank — drank — till the fiery stream 
flowed down his throat like water. Erceldoune watched 
him with eager, aching eyes; every moment seemed an 
eternity, every thought maddened him till he felt like 9 
31 * 


366 


IDALIA. 


desert brute ; he could not stir till this priest lay senseless 
before him. 

He paced the narrow limits of his cell like a caged lion, 
his face dark as night, his heart panting till its throbs 
sounded through the stillness, his breast heaving till the 
loose light folds of the fishing-shirt felt like a case of iron, 
his gaze never leaving the obese wavering figure of the 
stupefied Italian, who followed his movement with a dizzy, 
blinded sight that grew dimmer and dimmer with every 
moment that the braudy rose over his brain like waves that 
washed all lingering sense away. 

At last the pitcher dropped with a crash from hands 
that lost all power ; a vacuous laugh sounded a moment 
in the Umbrian’s throat; his eyes stared senselessly at 
the slender silver cimeter of the young moon that shone 
through the slit of the casement, then their lids closed, his 
head fell back, he lay like a log of wood on the pallet — 
unconscious, sightless, dead drunk. 

Erceldoune stooped over him, and forced his eyelids up; 
by the look of the eyeballs beneath he saw that this was 
no feint, but the deep-drugged sleep of intoxication that 
would be unbroken for a score of hours, whose stupor 
made the man it had enchained powerless as a stone, brain- 
less as a hog, deaf to all sound, insensible of all existence ; 
he wanted no more. 

With his knife he slashed noiselessly the band of the 
great keys that swung at the monk’s girdle, and fastened 
them on his own, so muffled that they would make no 
sound as he moved. He looked at his pistols, and put 
them back in his sash ready sprung ; they were double- 
barreled revolvers, that carried sure death in their tubes. 
Then he laid his hand on the hound’s collar, led him with- 
out, closed the door, and drew its bolts, locking in the 
Umbrian. 

The dormitory was quite dark ; not even the moon’s 
rays strayed into its narrow black aisle of stone, with the 
double line of cells flanking its length ; a single footfall 
overheard, a single echo sounding down the silence, and 
the sleeping monks would pour out of their lairs upon 
him. While waiting, he had bound his feet with withes of 
hay, so that they fell noiselessly on the pavement; and the 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


8GT 


hound stole softly on, as he had been bred to steal on a 
roebuck’s slot or a brigand’s track. The first thing Eroel- 
doune sought was to make the road free to leave the 
building; he found his way, that he had carefully noted as 
he came, back to the great entrance. The whole place 
was still ; there was not a sound ; he passed uninterrupt- 
edly to the vaulted gate-passage. Here a single oil-lamp 
burned, its light dully shed on the broad low oak door, 
with its iron cramps and fastenings. He drew back the 
bolts gently, and turned the keys in the two ponderous 
locks ; the door would open now at a touch. He motioned 
to the hound to wait and guard it ; the dog understood 
the trust, and couched motionless as though cast in 
bronze ; a truer or a bolder sentinel could not be placed 
there, and it was not for the first time that the brave saga- 
cious Servian monarch had been trusted in a crisis of life 
or death. Then rapidly, and with the light, swift tread 
of a deer, Erceldoune retraced his steps ; he had but the 
shadowy, rambling information of the monk to guide him 
to where Idalia was, but he knew, by that, that she was in 
the westward wing of the monastery, and he made his way 
there through the thick darkness about him, and down the 
stone passages winding one in another. It was all so 
still ; he thought the story of the drunken Italian must 
have been a drink-inspired dream. 

And yet — men who came for shame would come in 
silence and in secret ; his hand was on his pistols as he 
went, his limbs shook as he traversed the interminable 
gloom, a hot joy, a terrible torture, were on him ; he went 
to save her — and he might be too late. 

He had found his way into what, as far as he could 
judge, was the western part, close on the chapel which the 
Umbrian had spoken of as the place of her fresh lodgment. 
Here, also, the darkness was unbroken ; he could not 
pierce it to see a yard in advance ; he felt the rough cold 
stone of the wall against his hand ; he felt by the greater 
ct illness of the air that no ray of daylight ever pene- 
trated ; lie paused a moment, tempted at all risk of dis- 
covery to return and fetch the dog to track her. At that 
instant his eyes caught a faint narrow thread of light, pale 
and close to the floor — the light, doubtless, of a chamber 


368 


ID ALIA. 


within glimmering above the door sill ; he made his way 
toward it, careless what hand might be stretched out to 
arrest his course ; before he reached it, the sweet imperial 
tones of a voice that thrilled him like an electric touch 
rang through the solitude. 

“ Back 1 — or your life or mine ends. It matters little 
which !” 

The voice was clear as a bell and rich as music, but it 
vibrated with a meaning that struck like steel to the heart 
of the man who loved her; — it told him all. 

With the force of a giant he threw himself against the 
door, guided to it by the light that gleamed beneath 
against the stones. Passion lent him herculean strength ; 
the bar within was drawn, but the w r eight of his pressure 
suddenly flung on the panels sent both bolts and sockets 
back, wrenched from their fastenings, while the wood was 
shivered beneath the crash, and a dusky yellow light flared 
in his eyes from the cell within. 

Across the broken half of the door still jammed by its 
staples to the floor he saw Idalia ; such light as there was, 
was on her where she stood close pressed to the bare stone 
wall, an agony upon her face, but an agony that had in it 
loathing and scorn unutterable, and had even now no touch 
of fear ; the rich-hued draperies of her mask-dress were 
torn, as though she had just wrenched herself free from 
some polluting grasp ; her hair was loosened, and against 
the fairness of her bosom she held clinched the slender 
blade of the Venetian stiletto, its point turned inward 
against her heart. Above her stood the magnificence of 
her great tyrant’s lofty form. 

As the bolts broke, and the splintered beechwood flew 
in fragments, Giulio Villaflor swept round, his forehead 
red, his eyes alight with a Borgia’s fnry of baffled and 
licentious love — an amazed rage on him at the stranger 
who dared stand between him and his captive, between him 
and his will. With one glance, in which his gaze met hers 
— with a lion’s spring, Erceldoune was on the mighty pre- 
late, his hand at the other’s throat, as a forest hound’s 
fangs fasten in a wolf’s ; the shock of the sudden collision 
dragged the Italian back staggering and breathless ; ere 
he heard or saw his antagonist, the sinewv arms crushed 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


36 $ 


him, and the reckless violence tore him away. Then that 
sheer blood-instinct woke in Yillaflor which wakes with 
the first sense of conflict in all men not cowards from their 
birth ; he closed with his unknown foe, whose gripe was at 
his throat, holding him powerless. 

Not a word was breathed, yet both knew — strangers 
though they were — that they met thus but for her sake. It 
was the work of an instant, yet to the Neapolitan it seemed 
long as half a life, that struggle in which the lightning 
swoop of his unseen enemy swept him from his prey, and 
bore down on him with the might of vengeance, in the 
silence of the night which he had thought had veiled his 
tyranny and his crime from all eyes. No living man had 
ever crossed the will or the passions of the great prelate 
until now that he was seized as lions seize in the death- 
grapple. 

They were almost perfectly matched ; equal in strength 
as in stature, though in one a life of adventure and hardi- 
hood had braced all that in the other a life of effeminate 
indulgence had enervated. Giulio Yillaflor beneath his 
sacerdotal robes had a warrior’s frame and a warrior’s 
soul ; many a time, hearing of battle-fields and soldier’s 
perils, he had longed to gird a sword on his loins and go 
down in the van to the slaughter ; and as the gripe of 
Erceldoune’s hand fastened on his throat, and the gleam 
of his enemy’s eyes flashed suddenly into his, the desert 
rage, the desert courage, roused in the silken soft-footed 
panther of the Church. In the lamp-lit cell, under the black 
vaulted roof, in the hush of the midnight-silenced monastery, 
they wrestled together in that wild-beast conflict, which 
makes the men who are maddened by it savage and blood- 
thirsty as the beasts whose ferocity they share. 

Such feeble flickering light as there was in the dungeon 
shone on the majestic figure of the priest, clothed in the 
dark floating robes of the Church, and the athletic form 
of his foe, in the white loose linen dress of the Capriote 
sailors, as breast to breast, face to face, with their lofty 
limbs twined like gladiators, and their hands at each other’s 
throats, they swayed, and reeled, and rocked to and fro, in 
that deadly embrace. It was the work of scarce twenty 
seconds ; yet in it they rent and tore at each other as lion 
Y 


370 


ID ALIA. 


and leopard may do in the yellow dust of a tropic dawn, 
when long famine has made both ravenous for blood, and 
each beast knows that he must conquer and kill, or feel the 
fangs plow down into heart and flanks, and his own life 
pour out forever. The prelate, who, ere now, had never 
even known a hand too roughly brush his sacred person, 
sought only to fling off the grasp that strangled and the 
arras that crushed him ; his foe, rife with revenge and 
burning with a rival’s hate against the spoiler who would 
have left him nothing of his love save a vain unending 
agony, could have torn his heart out where they wrestled 
in as deadly a combat as ever was that with which retiarius 
and secutor reddened the white sand of Augustan amphi- 
theaters. 

A moment, and the hardier strength, the leonine force, 
of Erceldoune, so often tested in victory under the red 
foliage of Canadian forests and the scorching suns of Af- 
rican skies, conquered ; he crushed the priest in his sinewy 
arms till the chest-bones bent, and the breath was stifled, 
as in the gripe of the Arctic bear; then, with one last 
effort, he swung the Italian off, and raising him by the 
waist, flung him with all his might downward on to the 
stone floor, the limbs falling with a dull, crushing, breaking 
sound as they were dashed against the granite. 

Thrown so that his head smote the flags with a shock 
like iron meeting iron, Villaflor fell insensible, the force 
with which he was tossed outward stunning his senses, and 
throwing him a bruised, motionless, huddled mass in the 
gloom of the dusky cell. The proud and princely ecclesi- 
astic lay powerless, silenced, broken, helpless, like a dead 
cur, in the heart of the monastery where his word was law, 
and his will absolute as any sovereign’s. 

His foe stood above him, his foot on the prostrate throat, 
that swelled and grew purple with the suffocated breath, 
the stifled blood. He had lost all memory save the sheer 
animal impulse to slaughter and avenge ; and his heel 
ground down on to the Neapolitan’s neck, treading out 
life till the rich lips of the Roman gasped in unconscious 
torture, and the olive tint of his bold smooth brow grew 
black as the full veins throbbed and started beneath the 
skin. 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


37 l 

One pressure more, and the last pulse of existence would 
have been crushed out where he lay, with his teeth clinched 
and his senseless eyes staring upward : — the touch that 
could lead him where it would, as a child, fell lightly on 
her avenger’s arm. Idalia’s voice thrilled him with its 
sweet brief words : 

“ Wait ! You are too brave for that. He is fallen ; let 
him lie.” 

Her gaze dwelt on him, full, humid, eloquent, speaking 
her gratitude far more deeply than by words. Breathless, 
victorious, with the war-lust in his eyes, and his heart 
panting under the bruised muscles and the aching sinews 
of the chest to which his enemy had been strained in so 
deadly an embrace, Erceldoune turned and looked at the 
woman for whose sake he had fought, as a hound, called 
off from the throat of the thief he has pulled down, looks 
at the master he obeys, even while he longs to serve him, 
and revenge him, with the death-gripe. 

He took his heel off the neck of Giulio Yillaflor. 

“As you will.” 

His voice shook over the simple words; his face flushed 
hotly to the very temples as, for the first time, he met her 
gaze ; his eyes searched hers, thirstily wistful, wildly 
eager. 

“ Come, for the love of God ! You trust me ?” 

“As I never trusted any.” 

She stretched out to him, as she spoke, her fettered 
hands that, even chained, had found strength in them to 
hold the slender blade that would have sheathed itself in 
her heart or her tyrant’s. There was that in the action 
which, even in such a moment, made him feel faint and 
blind with hope. It repaid him all — would have repaid 
him his death-stroke, had he laid dying at her feet. 

For all answer he crushed the steel links that hung, 
holding her wrists powerless, in the grasp which had stifled 
Giulio Villaflor, and bent and wrenched and twisted them 
with the same force as that by which he had once torn off 
an Indian boar from its writhing human prey; the chain 
broke and fell asunder. 

His eyes, as they looked up to hers, spoke a meaning tc 


372 


IDALIA. 


which her own heart answered as flame leaps to the touch 
of a torch. 

44 We will have one freedom — the freedom of death, if 
not of life !” 

She knew all that the whisper meant ; knew that he 
might be powerless to give her the liberty of existence, 
but that he would give her the liberty of the grave — and 
share it. 

As the links of her fetters broke, a rush, an alarm, a 
tumult, were borne down the silence from the distant cor- 
ridors ; the monks had awakened, and found either their 
stranger-guest absent or their bolted gates unloosed. Those 
doors once freshly closed, those sleepers once aroused from 
their countless cells, and every avenue of escape would be 
sealed, every chance of flight ended forever. 

Without a pause for breath, without a glance at the fallen 
form of the great churchman, without sense or memory ol 
the aching sinews and the bruised nerves that throbbed in 
heavy pain across his own breast, where the strength of his 
foe had dealt him blows that had rained down like an iron 
hammer on an iron plate, he drew his pistol with one hand, 
while with the other he held her close against him. 

“We will beat them yeti’ 7 he said, in his teeth, that 
were clinched like the strong fangs of a mastiff; there was 
the glow of fiery passion on his face, and his heart, as his 
arm touched her, beat as it had never beaten even in the 
close-locked struggle with the man who had sought to deal 
her dishonor. He was a soldier at the core; all a soldier’s 
daring, all a soidier’s war-fire, rose in him, as with him 
alone lay her defense, her liberty, her life. 

With the swiftness of a moorland deer he plunged out 
into the gloom of the passage beyond, and dashed down 
the windings of the narrow vaulted ways. The darkness 
was like the depth of midnight, and the first false step 
might fling them like broken birds upon the stone of the 
wall that towered on either side, or down the sheer descent 
of the granite stairs that ever and again at intervals led 
into the unknown horrors of the underground crypt and 
vaults. Yet, as he bore her onward through the ray less, 
treacherous blackness, a sweet, fierce joy was on him : for 
her pleasures, and her riches, and her brilliance, half the 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


SI 3 


world might be her comrades and her candidates, but he 
alone shared her danger. In her prosperity so many had 
been round her; in her extremity he had no rival. 

The rush of feet, the clamor of voices, the tremulous 
utterance of vague alarm pierced shrilly and incessantly 
from the farther end of the building the dead silence of 
the night. From the broken cries which reached him, he 
could tell that the priests knew nothing as yet of the fall 
of their great leader, but had been awakened by the noise 
of the far-off conflict, and had discovered his absence and 
the Umbrian’s drunken sleep. But one chance remained — . 
the single chance of reaching the entrance-hall before they 
searched there for him. 

“ Can you fire ?” he whispered, as he bore her onward 
and outward to where the feeble lamp-light gleamed yel- 
low and faint in the passages he had traversed. 

In answer, her hand glided over the barrel of his weapon, 
and closed on the butt firmly. 

“ My life has hung on my own shot before now.” 

There was no tremor in her own tones as she replied to 
him; there was only the calm valor that thrilled him as a 
clarion thrills the soldier who hears its silvery melody com- 
mand him to face death and to deal it. 

“ Promise me one thing?” she murmured. 

There was light enough now, gray and dusky as it was, 
for him to see her eyes as they looked up to his, the gold 
gleam of her hair against his breast, the glisten of the steel 
blade against her bosom. 

“ All things.” 

“ Then, if we are outnumbered, keep the last shot for 
me, and take sure aim.” 

A mortal anguish quivered through him ; he knew it 
might well prove that this boon, and this only, would be 
all that he could do to rescue or obey her. 

“ The last but one,” he answered. “ The last shall bring 
me to you.” 

The words were brief, and had the noble simplicity of 
his own nature in them, blent with a high devotion that 
held her honor dearer yet than all her beauty, and would 
obey her will even unto this last thing of death. He had 
loved her ere now as dogs love, as slaves love, as men 

32 


3T4 


IDALIA. 


love whose passions can make them madmen, dotards, 
fools; but with that hour he loved her more grandly, more 
deeply, with a passion that sank into her heart, and stirred 
it as the storm winds stir the sea; that, for the first time in 
all the years in which this insanity had been roused by her 
and lavished on her, moved her to reverence what she ruled, 
to feel the strength, the depth, the force of this life that she, 
and she alone, could break as a child breaks reeds. She 
was silent; she let herself be borne by him through the 
twilight; she, too, felt a lulling sweetness, a subtle charm, 
in that breathless passage through the gloom, whose only 
goal might be the grave. She, too, felt something of that 
dreamy sorcery which lies in the one word — “ together.” 

Nearing them came the clamor of the shrill Italian 
voices; behind them, from the cell where Giulio Villaflor 
was stretched senseless, the shouts of those who found their 
lord lie dying as they deemed, rang the alarm through the 
whole monastery, till the stones echoed with the outcry. 
From the stillness of slumber and the drowsy monotone of 
prayer, the whole silence teemed with noise and tumult ; 
the whole building was alive with men, who started from 
their first stupor of sleep in vague terror and senseless ex- 
citation, while above all thundered the roll of the hound’s 
bay, attacked at his post and giving challenge to his men- 
aeers. 

“ If he can guard the gates, you are free !” 

The cry broke from Erceldoune with the agony of a 
prayer as he pressed on into the great hall, where the sin- 
gle swinging entrance lamp burned dully through night and 
day. Hope almost died in him as he saw the crowd of 
monks that filled it, while before the unbarred door the dog 
couched like a lion ready to spring, with his mane erect, 
and his eyeballs red with fire, and his mighty teeth gleam- 
ing white under his black-bearded muzzle, holding them 
so at bay that none dared be the first to pass him and 
swing to afresh the unloosed bolts and chains. They for- 
got the hound as they saw the prisoner of their Church, 
and rushed on to her with a shrill yell. There were men 
among them who had flung the priestly robes over lives of 
foul crimes and unsuccessful villainies ; and men who had 
hated her for that mere feminine forbidden loveliness that 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


here, in their stone-locked den, they never looked on ; and 
men who would have killed her, were it only that such ser- 
vice might find them fair favor in the eyes of the great 
dignitary, who held their fates in the hollow of his hand. 
These turned from the dog, and threw themselves head- 
long toward Erceldoune as he came out of the darkness of 
the corridor into the entrance square, low-roofed and 
broad, with the arch of the door filling its farther end. 

He paused, and leveled his pistol full in the eyes of the 
foremost. 

“ Let nfe pass, or you are dead men.” 

The flash of the steel tube in their sight, the pressure of 
its cold circle on the forehead of the nearest, staggered 
them a moment; they recoiled slightly one on another. 
They had measured the height and the girth of this stran- 
ger’s limbs as they had sat with him at their meal, and 
they dreaded the tempest of his wrath. He, holding her 
to him still with one arm, and covering the foremost with 
his aim, thrust himself against the mass of the monks — 
half-clothed as they started from their first heavy slumbers 
— and strove to pierce his way through them to the gates. 
A voice from behind cut the silence like a bullet’s hiss. 

“ Cowards ! Bolt the doors and trap them; we can pin- 
ion them then at our leisure 1” 

The speaker, as his figure towered in the shadow, was 
a gaunt Abruzzian giant, fierce-eyed, hollow-cheeked, eager 
and lustful for slaughter ; in a long dead time he had been 
a chief among ferocious soldiery, who had brued his hands 
deep in blood, and the old savage instincts flared alight, 
and the old brute greeds breathed free again, as for once 
after long captivity they broke the bondage of the priest- 
hood. He took the leadership among the herd of half- 
awakened and bewildered monks, as the long-stifled im- 
pulses of war and murder rose in him, and glared wolf-like 
from his eyes, reddened with a light that was well-nigh in- 
sanity. The Abruzzian lived once more in a thousand 
dead days of battle, of rapine, and of cruelty, as he strode 
downward into the hall, heaving aloft a great iron bar with 
which he had armed himself, in default of other weapon. 

Erceldoune, as he turned his head, and saw the lamp 
light glow on the lean ravenous face, kuew that here lay 


IDALIA. 


BY G 

his worst foe; the rest might be driven like a flock of sheep 
if once terror fairly mastered them, but in this man he read 
the bloodthirst of the tiger, the fiercer and the more ruth- 
less for its long repression. With the keen glance of a 
soldier, the warrior-monk sprang forward to secure the 
doorway ; once netted, he knew that the prisoners could 
be dealt with at pleasure. The weight of the iron bar was 
lifted, to be hurled on to the hound’s head, where Sulla was 
planted at his guard, and — no more to be moved in fear 
or in wrath than the sentinel, who perishes at his post for 
sake of honor and obedience — might be slain so Vith ease, 
though not passed or approached except at cost of life. The 
iron swung above the Abruzzian’s head, swaying lightly as 
a flail, to descend with another instant on to the dog’s bold 
brow; as it was raised, his arm fell paralyzed, Erceldoune’s 
first shot broke the bone above the wrist. Maddened with 
the pain, the monk shifted the bar to his left hand, and, 
forgetful of the hound, rushed on to his antagonist, head 
downward, with the blind infuriated onslaught of a wounded 
boar. Erceldoune, watching him with quick, unerring 
surety, was ready for the shock, and, sparing his fire — for 
he knew not how much more yet he might need it — caught 
him with a blow on the temple as he rushed on, which sent 
him staggering down like a felled ox. As he dropped, his 
brethren, catching that contagion of conflict which few 
men, priests or laymen, can resist when once launched intG 
it, threw themselves forward to revenge his fall, rough- 
armed with the hatchets, the clubs, the pickaxes, used in 
out- door toil, which hung or leaned against the wall. 

Brigands of Calabria, tigers of the Deccan, would not 
have been wilder in their rage than these sons of peace, 
whose passions were for the first time loosened from con- 
trol, and took in one brief hour payment for all that 
had been silenced, and iced, and fettered under the weight 
of the Church’s rule. The sight of a woman’s loveliness 
lashed like a scourge the bitter, longing, futile envy roused 
beforehand in them by the stranger who had broken their 
bread, and showed them all that they had lost in losing 
forever their freedom of will and act. The eyes of Idalia, 
as they flashed over them, stung to fever heat the vain 
regret, the hate of their own bonds, the acrid jealousy of 


LION AND LEOPARD. 


377 


all liberty lost to them and still sweet in others’ lives, which 
had woke in them with the first ring of their guest’s firm 
footfall and fearless tones. What was at riot in them was 
not a jailer’s rage or a hireling’s terror of chastisement ; 
it was their own heart-sickness, their own years of pas- 
sionate pain, their own rebellion, and their own despair, 
which made them savage as murderers. 

For the only time in all his life a deadly fear came on 
Erceldoune — fear for her. He glanced down once on her, 
and her eyes gave him back a smile proud, serene, resolute, 
sweet beyond all tenderness — a smile that said, as though 
her lips spoke it, “Remember !” It nerved him afresh, as 
though the courage of Arthur, the power of Samson, poured 
by it into his veins and limbs. He had sworn to give her 
the freedom of death, if that of life were beyond his 
reach; the memory of his promise made him mad with 
that desperate strength whereby men in their agony reach 
that which, told or heard in the coolness of calm reason, 
seems a dream of impossibilities, wild as those of the deeds 
of the Red Cross. 

“ Fire with me !” he said in his teeth. “Our lives hang 
on it.” 

She heard, and raised her weapon steadily as the priests 
rushed at them, while the great gaunt body of the Abruz- 
zian lay like a mass of timber at their feet ; the two shots 
echoed together, aimed at the mass of stretching hands, of 
brawny arms, of gleaming hatchets, of lifted clubs, that 
was within a hand’s breadth of them in the twilight of 
the lamplit hall. The mass wavered, quivered, staggered 
back ; in that one breathless pause Erceldoune, with his 
arms round her so that she was held close against his 
breast, dashed forward with a rush as a lion will dash 
through the cordon of hunters who have fenced him in for 
the slaughter, hurling them back and front, left and right, 
by the impetus that bore him through them as swiftly, as 
resistlessly, as a scythe clears its way through the grasses. 

One monk, more rapid than the rest, swerved aside from 
that terrific charge which carried all before it like the sweep 
of cavalry, and threw himself against the door to swing 
the oak close ere the fugitives could reach it. “Seize 
him 1” shouted Erceldoune. The hound had waited, pant- 
32 5 * 1 


378 


ID ALIA. 


ing and agonized, for the command ; he sprang on the 
monk’s breast, and threw him prostrate, his fangs clinched 
in the man’s throat almost ere the words that loosed him 
from his guard were fairly uttered. The fair, still, lustrous 
night gleamed soft and starlit through the narrow space of 
the opened portals ; the world and all its liberty lay be- 
yond. Blows were rained on him, yells hooted in his ear, 
hands clutched his clothes, his limbs, his sash, to wrench him 
back ; an axe hurled at him struck him, burying its blade an 
inch deep in his shoulder ; a herd of devils shrieked, cursed, 
wrestled, and pursued behind him. He heeded nothing, felt 
nothing, heard nothing ; he only guarded her from the weap- 
ons that were flung in his rear, so that none should touch her 
save such as struck first at him, and bore her like the wind 
through the half-opened door out into the night-air and 
down the flight of rock-hewn stairs ; the hound coursing 
before him down the slope of the black rugged precipitous 
steps, slippery with moss, and worn uneven by the treading 
steps of many centuries. One step unsure, and they would 
be hurled head downward on to the stones below ; there 
was no moonlight on the depth of intense shadow that 
shelved straight into fathomless darkness ; behind, the 
rush of the priests followed, and the clamor of their shouts 
shook the night silence; yet on he went, fearless, reckless, 
impervious to pain, and feeling drunk, with the sweet free- 
dom of the fresh night wind, with the beating of her heart 
upon his own. To have held her thus one instant, he 
would have given his life up the next. 

Of that downward passage he had no knowledge, no 
memory in after-time ; he followed it as men in a night-mare 
follow some hideous path that ends in chaos ; he touched 
the earth at last, clearing the three last granite rungs of 
the rock ladder with a leap that landed him in the moon- 
lighted breadth of turf that stretched beneath. He rushed 
across it at the speed of a wild deer, making straight for 
the cypress knot where he had bidden the horses be waiting. 
A monk held him close in chase — so close that the priest 
reached the ground well-nigh with him. He did not see 
or dream his danger; Sulla did, and, with one mighty 
bound, was on the Italian’s naked chest, rending, and 
tearing, and crushing him as he had dealt with wolf and 


LION AND LEOPARD 


3*9 

with bear in his own woods. The monk fell well-nigh 
senseless, and the dog tore onward through the moonlight 
with a loud bay of joy, of challenge, and of freedom. 

They were alone ; the pursuit could not reach them for 
seconds at least — seconds, precious in that extremity as 
years. The clamor and tumult of the monastery pealed 
from the height above ; but few of the brethren would dare 
to risk the peril of descent in the blackness of midnight, 
the few that would must be some moments yet before they 
could be on him. In the shadow of the cypresses stood 
the horses, held by a German lad, and eased by rest till 
they were fresh as though they had not left their stalls. 

Without words, she threw herself in the saddle ; she had 
ridden stirrupless ere then across the brown, dark desola- 
tion of the Campagna, in an autumn night, with the Papal 
troops out against her. In all her sovereignty, he had 
never seen her beautiful as she was now in the white flood 
of starlight that fell through the cypress-boughs. Idalia 
was of that nature to which danger is as strong wine. Her 
face was pale to the lips, but resolute as any soldier’s on 
the eve of victory; her hair shaken down rested in great 
masses that gleamed golden in the flickering light, her right 
hand still held the pistol as though it were some love-gage 
that she treasured close, and the fairness of her face was 
set calm as death, resolute as steel, even while her eyes 
burned, and glowed, and dilated with the ardent fire of 
war, and with a look sweeter than that which swept over 
him like a sorcery. 

“ Off 1” she said, low and eagerly. “ Every second is 
life !” 

While she spoke he was in the saddle ; the horses, young 
and wild, broke away at a touch in a stretching gallop, 
with the brave hound coursing beside them mad with the 
joy of his liberty. The hoofs were noiseless on the moss 
that was damp and yielding by the moisture from the 
swamps, and the belt of the cypress screened their flight 
from the monastery; the monks would search for hours till 
their torches flared out, in every nook and cleft of the 
rocks around, ere ever they would dream that that mid- 
night ride had borne away their prisoner. 

Out of the cypress grove and beyond the beetling wall 


380 


ID ALIA 


of the crags the moonlight lay in a broad white sneet, clear 
and soft as dawn, across the open country ; mirrored in 
the surface of the still lagoons, and scarcely broken by a 
tree or hut. Afar the still green fields of rye and maize 
were scarce stirred by a breath, and the twisted boughs of 
the olives, with their gray silver foliage, were veiled with 
a soft mist, the steam of the marshes and the plains. 
Through the sweet, luminous, half light, while the water- 
threaded earth trembled beneath them, and the rank grasses 
were crushed under their fleet hoofs, they rode as those 
alone ride behind whom pursues Death, and before whom 
lies Freedom. 

Through the shallow pools, with the water splashed to 
their girths, and circling away in eddying rings as they 
broke its slumbering quiet; through the vaporous haze 
that hung over the black expanse of the morass and the 
plain till they seemed to hunt down the white wraiths of 
its smoke that curled and uncurled before them ; through 
the tall, reedy grasses that broke as they crushed them, and 
sent a fresh, dreamy odor out on the air as they bowed 
their broad ribbons and their feathery clusters ; through 
the deep, intense silence, till the water-hen flew with a 
scream from her rest, and the downy owl brushed by with 
a startled rush, and the landrail woke with his shrill c r y 
from his sleep in the midst of the millet-stalks ; through 
the balmy southern nigbt they rode as those can only ride 
behind whom yawn a prison and a grave, before whom 
smile the world and all its liberty 


“stoop down and seem to kiss me ERE I DIE.” 381 


CHAPTER XX Y, 

“STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME ERE I DIE.” 

All through the night they rode on, till the slender arc 
of the young moon was sinking toward the west, and all 
the countless stars were shining larger and clearer toward 
the dawn, burning through the blue black darkness of the 
sky, veiled ever and again by sweeping trails of mist. 

Under the gray dim colossal arches of the Ferratino 
gates fresh horses waited ; the tired beasts were changed 
in haste and without question, and the young unworn ones 
raced on through the gloom as fleetly as wild horses sweep 
over prairie plains. Behind them hunted Death ; with the 
mo r ning light the whole land would be as one host risen 
against them, as one snare spread to trap them ; the blood- 
hounds of a Church were on their track, and the hate of a 
k ng and a priest ran them down ; yet scarce a touch of 
tear, scarce a breath of the chillness of terror were on them ; 
they had drunk deep of the rich hot wine of danger, and 
one at least was blind with the blindness of passion. 

The world was still about them ; all things slept. The 
earth was hushed and without sound, as though the deep 
tranquillity of death had fallen everywhere. Only through 
the calmness came the low sigh of the air through the 
grasses, and the liquid murmur of unseen waters foaming 
down from height to height, or stealing under the broad 
leafage of arum-shadowed channels. Nothing awakened 
around them, save the downy-wiDged aziola, or the change- 
ful bands of the fireflies gleaming like gold among the gray 
plumes of olives, or above the tender green seas of ripen- 
ing millet. The summer was still young, and the night was 
divine, as the nights of the south alone are ; the barren 
plains and the vaporous pools w r ere passed with the swift- 
ness of a dream, and beyond the olive belts and the outer 
woods of cypress lay the richness and riot of Italy, all 


332 


IDAL1A. 


shadowed and softened, and steeped in the moonbeams. 
Vineyards where the budding grapes were thrusting their 
first life through the leaves ; great chestnut woods, where 
no ray pierced the massive fans of foliage, and the ground 
was white as though from snow with the heavy fall of the 
dropped flowers ; fields where melon and gourd, and the 
fantastic shapes of the wild fig-tree coiled one iit another, 
fragrant as gods’ nectar, when the hoofs trod out the fruit 
and bruised the amber skins, and broke through the filmy, 
silvery webs of weaving insects, all glittering with the dew ; 
black, silent groves, noiseless and cavernous, with the hol- 
low moan of earth-imprisoned torrents, and lofty aisles of 
cedars shutting in the broken ivy-covered ruins of the de- 
serted altars of dead gods;, vast piles of rocks, and dim, 
soft stretching plains and hills covered with ancient strong- 
holds mouldering to dust, and sweet nestling dells where 
sheeted water mirrored in the starlight the slender stems 
of sea-pines and the marble shafts of classic temples. 
Through them they rode, never drawing rein, with the 
hound coursing beside them, through the changeful light of 
the calm late hours, guiding their flight by the stars, and 
holding ever straight for the sea. With sunrise the soldiers 
of the king, the mercenaries of Church and of State, would 
be out over the land ; the night alone was liberty. Liberty, 
for the breath of the wind on their brows, for the splash of 
river-spray on their lips, for the wild joy of fearless speed, 
for the fragrance of trampled flowers, for the limitless glory 
of sight free to range over the width of the earth, for the 
nameless rapture of living when every sense and pulse of 
life is hot as with wine, yet is lulled as with sleep, and 
holds the pain of the world well endured for the sake of 
one hour of joy. Liberty, in whose sweetness lies all the 
ecstasy of life, and in whose loss lies all its anguish. 

Through the shallow foam of half-dry water-courses, 
through the long sear grasses where the cattle couched, 
through the odorous thickets of wild myrtle, through the 
withes of osiers where the bittern, wakened, rose with his 
sullen booming cry, they rode on toward the sea. Down 
the perilous slopes of ravines, where the loosened shingles 
shook in showers into yawning depths ; down naked 
breadths of stone where no mosses broke the polished in* 


“stoop down and seem to kiss me ERE I DIE.” 383 


cline, and one uncertain step was death ; across bridges 
high in air, spanning the white smoke of boiling torrents, 
while the timbers shook and bent beneath them ; under 
mighty aisles of oak and cypress, where no path led save 
such as the rush of their gallop forced between the break- 
ing boughs, they held their way by the light of the planets, 
through the twilight haze that deepened to blackest gloom 
where the woods closed above, and lightened to silvery 
luster where the plains stretched out unbroken. All 
memory of danger, all sense of danger had fallen from 
them ; on her the dreamy night silence and the passionate 
sweetness of freedom rested ; with him there was no thought 
remaining save that he alone held his place by her bridle- 
rein, that he alone had delivered her out of her bondage. 

In the vast calm around them ail was at rest save their 
own hearts, save their own flight that held on for the same 
goal ; all human life except their own seemed banished 
from the world, and the slumber-hushed earth left only to 
them ; through ravine and woodland, through vineyard and 
valley, under the overhanging brow of lonely cliffs, and 
across the swaying bridge of giddy heights they rode to- 
gether; and while the flickering light flashed down through 
parted leaves upon her beauty, and ever and again as he 
swept on beside her he met the gleam of her eyes through 
the shadows, he who loved her felt drunk with his joy. 
What cared he though he should fall dead at her feet when 
that midnight ride should have reached its end ? He should 
have passed to his grave with her. 

Where the jagged iron had been hurled against him, the 
rent nerves throbbed, and the linen was stained with blood ; 
where his rival had strained him in that deadly embrace, 
the breadth of his chest was bruised as though weightily 
struck by a mace, and compressed as though tight-bound 
in bands of steel ; but he felt none of its pain, he knew 
none of its suffering, he only knew that she rode beside 
him, that through him she was saved, that once his arms 
had held her, that still in all the width of the world there 
was none with her in her extremity save himself, — whose 
love she had forbidden, yet whose love, she had seen, out- 
lasted all, and only asked of her a place with her in her 
danger, a place near her in her death. 


384 


IDALIA. 


No words passed between them ; the breathless passage 
of their flight left no space for speech, and the soft hush of 
the darkened world was too solemn to be broken. There 
was no sound, except the throbbing of the hoofs’ beat 
scouring fast as the wind the seaward way to the shore. 
They had broken away from the beaten track, lest any 
should see and mark their course, and had borne straight 
across the country westward to where the bay lay — break- 
ing through the blossomed vines, the sheets of maize, the 
nets outspread for birds in southern mode, the deep-grown 
screens of myrtles fencing villa lands, and the wild growth 
of rocky channels, where hidden streams ran below earth, 
and made the vegetation riot rank and thick, where the 
snake found its lair, and the mosquito swarmed in hun- 
dreds, and the hot heavy vapor uprose like clouds of steam. 
Now and then her eyes turned on him in the darkness of 
cypress shadows, or where some yawning river-bed, yellow 
and reed-choked, and unfathomed in the gloom, was crossed 
with a measureless leap, their horses close abreast. For all 
else, except the echo of the ringing hoofs trampling through 
ripening corn, or sounding loud on rocky pathways, there 
was utter silence between them as they swept onward to 
the sea, as swiftly and as surely, by unreasoned instinct, as 
hunted deer make for it, when before them lie^the waves 
and behind them the hounds hold chase. 

The night was fast waning, the stars growing larger, till 
the whole skies seemed on fire with their brilliance ; the 
hours were passing swiftly — the hours which alone were 
safety. Here and there, from loviely marshes, the bittern’s 
booming call sounded, desolate and mournful ; or, as the 
trodden millet-stalks muffled the noise of their gallop, the 
cry of the cicada could be heard from under the maize. 
The world went by them vague as a dream, mist-like as a 
cloud ; ruined temples, shadowy landscapes, waters glisten- 
ing white, monastic piles darkly looming down from rocky 
heights, sullen depths malarious impenetrable death-laden, 
divine beauty gleaming vine crowned under southern moon- 
beams, all passed by them like the fleeting, changeful phan- 
toms of a feverish sleep. They rode on and on, without 
thought, without refuge, with one impulse only, to leave 
league on league between them and the abhorrent dens of 


“STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME ERE I DIE.” 385 

the Church ; the burning breath of the past agony was on 
them, driving them forward as the curling prairie flames 
drive the lives they course after; and the riot of liberty 
was in them both, with every breath of wind that tossed 
the foliage from their path, with every current of air that 
drove sweet, and wild, and warm against their faces, as 
they dashed down by the pole-star’s guide straight to the 
sea, yet northward first, ere they bent round to the shore, 
since Naples, where she lay amid her loveliness, was the ti- 
ger’s lair of priest and king, was death and worse than death. 

The horses coursed like greyhounds ; their feet scarcely 
touched the earth; the shallow brooks, the parched soil, 
the reddening osiers were scattered as they went ; neck 
and neck, their heads stretched like racers, their flanks 
heaving, their bits foam-covered, they held on at that mad 
pace, without pause, without stint, now forced through 
screens of netted boughs, while the great chestnut fans 
blinded their eyes, and the branches snapped with a crash, 
and the vipers slid from under their feet — now scouring 
swamps where the earth quaked beneath them, and the 
heron’s wings, startling, brushed them, as the brooding 
birds rose with a rush — now keeping footing, as best they 
could, down narrow ledges of slippery rock, where the 
mosses glided and the stone crumbled under the crush of 
their thundering gallop. Mile on mile, league on league, 
were covered with that breathless racing speed, that reck- 
less course on giddy heights, that headlong plunge through 
tawny waters ; when any risk, darker than the rest, was in 
their way, his hand closed on her bridle-rein, so that the 
peril which might menace her should by no chance swerve 
by from him ; and, in these moments, her eyes met his, and 
dwelt on him with a look that made him blind with the 
sickness of hope. She was his in these hours at least — 
his in her need, in her solitude, in her jeopardy, in her 
flight ; his now, for this one night, so far as bonds of mutual 
danger coald so render her, so far as his arm alone to shield 
her, his heart alone to beat for her, his strength alone to 
stand between her and her foes, could lend him right to 
hold her so ; his, while the net and the withes were about 
her, and the sleuth-hounds were tracking her down, even 
though — if she ever again reached her freedom and her 
z 33 


386 


ID ALIA. 


sovereignty once more — she should forget that he once had 
served her thus, and bid him go and see her face no more. 
He loved her with an exceeding love ; not less would he 
have brought her from her misery, or less have laid down 
his life to save hers, though he had known that dying thus 
he should never have seen even one look that thanked him. 

Passion was stronger than pain, and gave him uncon- 
sciousness of it, as it had given him the thews and the 
sinews of giants iu the contest whereby he had freed her ; 
though the monk’s blows had been rained on him like a 
smith’s blows on his anvil, and his breast had been bruised, 
and dinted, and swollen by the grip of his priestly foe when 
they had strained and stifled each other like wrestlers in 
the death-fling, he had no feeling of suffering, no feeling of 
exhaustion. The reckless glow of triumph was on him ; 
the fragrance of the sultry night seemed to steep his senses 
in voluptuous delight ; the fierceness of contest and slaugh- 
ter were still hot in his veins, and the lulling charm of a 
dream fell upon him while the world lay sleeping in silence 
and darkness, and to his hand alone was delivered the de- 
fense of Idalia’s liberty. He would have reeled out of his 
saddle before he would have been conscious that illness 
was on him ; to have force still to ride on thus, he would 
have pressed into his side a dagger that had dealt him his 
death-wound, though he had known that, to purchase life 
so for an hour, was to lose life forever when the hour 
should be passed. 

At every leap their hunters rose to, the wound that the 
iron had slashed quivered and opened as though the rusted 
axe afresh was hurled at it ; at every convulsive bound 
with which the beasts cleared some riven chasm of stone or 
some high aloe fence that lifted its sharp foliage right in 
their course, the weight on his chest caught his breath, and 
the bruised muscles ached to bursting; often the stars grew 
giddy above him, and the lucciole glittering among the 
leaves looked a confused hear) of sparkling fire, till he 
could scarce tell which was earth beneath and which was 
sky above him ; often faintness came over him from the 
loss of the blood that had soaked his fishing-shirt through, 
and the weight of the blows dealt upon him which at the 
time of contest he had felt no more than he felt now the 


“STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME ERE I DIE." 387 

gentle rain of the svringa flowers as they were showered 
from the boughs they broke asunder. Yet he had barely 
any knowledge of this ; he flung it off him, and was strong 
as he rode — strong to watch every danger that threatened 
her in their passage — strong to lead their flight with a 
mountaineer’s keenness of vision, a desert-hunter’s instinct 
of guidance — strong to let her see no paleness on his face 
save the pallor of moonlight, no look in his eyes save the 
love that had dared all things for her, and would do so un- 
flinchingly on to the end, whatsoever that end might still 
be. A wild, senseless, fiery intoxication of joy was upon 
him ; he knew no pain, he knew no weakness — he fled with 
her alone through the sweet southern night. Come what 
future there would, no fate could wash this out, no fate 
could steal this from him ; — that once his arm had thrust 
dishonor and death back from her, that once his heart alone 
had been her shield against her foes. 

The first gray gleam of dawn was breaking where the 
morning star hung in the deep mystical blue of night, when 
their horses, panting, worn, steaming, covered with foam, 
and staggering in their gallop, tore down through forest 
glades of oak and bark into the heart of woods where once 
the altars of Dionysius had arisen, and the print upon the 
thyme where the wild goat had wandered had been kissed 
by shepherds’ lips as sacred grouud touched by the hallow- 
ing hoof of Fan. The wood stretched up a hillside’s slope 
dark even by day, so thickly woven were the old gnarled 
boughs, so heavy was the foliage even in summer drought, 
from the hidden streams that ran beneath its soil, sun- 
sheltered and making cool liquid music through the gloom, 
rising none knew whence, flowing none knew whither, but 
telling to all who chose to hear of the dead days when their 
song had mingled with the vine-feast chants to Bacchus, 
and had borne their cadence in companionship with the 
thoughts of Yirgil or of Martial. No heat could reach, 
no season parch, those subterranean waters that here and 
there broke up to sight, rushing brown and bright under 
the moon, but soon were lost again in the recesses of the 
earth, and only traced by the rich herbage that grew where- 
ever they wound, or — when the stillness was hushed into 
a silence intense as Alpine solitudes — by the murmuring 


ID ALIA. 


88 $ 

hollow ripple that told where they threaded their way 
through secret channels to the sea. Here the sun-rays 
could not touch to burn the grasses black ; here the twisted 
leafage was fresh and dew-laden as though a northern cool- 
ness fanned them; here the silvery arum uncurled above 
the screened channels of the brooks; here the white helle- 
bore thrust its delicate head through mosses green and 
curling as though they grew under English elm-woods. 

And herein the deep loneliness, sunk over their hocks in 
the water-fed reeds and grasses, the worn-out horses slack- 
ened speed and strained to reach a freshet that brimmed 
and bubbled under an aisle of oaks; and as the headlong 
gallop paused, and the swift rush of the air ceased, as they 
entered those dim aisles that had the twilight gloom and 
calm of some mighty temple to forgotten gods, a sudden 
blindness veiled all things — even her face — from his sight, 
Erceldoune swayed heavily forward on his saddle, the faint- 
ness of mortal pain vanquished him at last. 

With sheer instinct he threw himself from his stirrups 
and staggered toward her ; all was dark and sickly to his 
senses, and the iron bands seemed to crush tighter and 
harder round his chest, straining out the very life; but his 
thought was still for her, and he smiled in her eyes, though 
he could no longer see but only felt that they were on. him. 

“ Have no fear ; — it is nothing !” 

But even as the words left his lips his strength at length 
was conquered ; and senseless from the loss of blood, he 
reeled slightly, and fell, head backward, on the earth. 

Almost ere he had fallen Idalia was beside him ; she had 
not dreamed that he was wounded or even in suffering, till 
with those few gentle words he had staggered and swayed 
downward like a dying man. Then, where the moonlight 
strayed in through a parting in the branches above, she 
saw that his face was white as the arum lilies among which 
he fell, and that the snowy crowns of the flowers and their 
broad and pointed leaves were darkened with the stain of 
blood, soaking through the linen of his barcaroio’s dress. 
He was stretched there as when first she had found him 
under the Carpathian pine- woods, where he lay struck down 
by the bullets of his Greek assassin, with the vultures wait- 
ing above to swoop to their feast. For manv moments she 


“STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME ERE I DIE.” 389 

knelt by him, in the set mute apathy of anguish ; no tears 
rose before her sight, and her proud lips were pressed close 
without a sound, almost without a breath, but as she gazed 
an agony came in her eyes greater than any that the up- 
lifted scourge or the locked fetters of her prison had wrung 
from her. 

“ O God ! — not his life, too !” 

The prayer broke stifled and heartbroken from her very 
soul ; she had seen so many perish for her, perish through 
her; she had seen the brave lives at Antina fall like the 
ears of wheat, ripe to the reaping ; she had known that 
east and west, far and near, in the wide wastes of the Mag- 
yarland as in the silent streets of Venice, in the snow plains 
of the Muscovite empire as in the laughing loveliness of 
Lombard meadows, men had poured out their blood like 
water at her bidding, under her will, only for sake of that 
fatal beauty which many with their last wrath in the bat- 
tle-field or on the scaffold had cursed with bitter reproach, 
which some — and not so few — had to the last still blessed. 
So many had died for her ! — and now he who had found at 
her hands but coldness and suffering, and gone without 
reward for a loyalty passing all that even she had ever 
found, lay to all seeming dead or dying at her feet ; as a 
noble hound dies for its mistress’s sake, dies faithful to the 
last, though never may her hand have given him one caress, 
though never may her lips have spoken more than careless 
command or chili dismissal. 

She knew then that she loved him ; loved him not with 
pity, nor with disdain for love as weakness, nor with mere 
warmth to one who had risked all things in her cause, but 
loved him with a passion answering his own, with a passion 
holding the world worthless if he no more were numbered 
with the living. To-night, when his heart had throbbed 
against hers; to-night, when his strength had stood be- 
tween her and her destroyer; to-night, when his promise 
had been given her to save her with death, if no other free- 
dom were left him wherewith to rescue her; to-night, she 
had known that she had loved him with the love she had 
deemed dead in her heart, impossible to her nature ; she, 
with whom love had been but the scepter with which to 
sway slaves, the mandragora with which to blind madmen, 
33 * 


390 


ID ALIA. 


the supreme folly with which women, otherwise powerless, 
reach a power that mocks at kings and creeds, and reign 
over the broadest empire of earth. 

She knelt by him, mute, motionless, with a terrible long- 
ing in the haughty eyes that had never quailed under 
Giulio Villaflor’s and had made the Umbrian priest let fall 
the lash. In that moment — in the silence and the loneli- 
ness of the forest, where the shadows closed above them, 
and in all the width of the land there was not one whom 
she could summon to his aid, one whom she dared trust 
with their lives — the anguish she had oftentimes too mer- 
cilessly dealt, too lightly counted, recoiled back on her. She 
learned what it could be to bear this thing that men call 
love, this deadly gambling of heart, and thought, and sense 
which casts all stakes in fate upon the venture of another’s 
life; she, who had watched that madness so often and so 
long, with calm, contemptuous gaze, and tempted youth, 
and manhood, and age into it with a sorcerer’s smile, heed- 
ing the wreck she made no more than Circe heeded those 
who went down beneath the waves because her white arms 
waved them to that fatal sea. She loved him now with a 
great love ; passionate, with the fire that slept in her, yet 
pure so far as remorse could burn it pure, and harrowed 
deep with a contrition that would have purchased freedom, 
and peace, and joy for him had it been possible, at any 
^cost, at every sacrifice. 

The stillness was intense ; the solitude absolute as in a 
desert, no living thing was near, and had a peopled city 
been around in place of that profound impenetrable deso- 
lation, none could have been summoned to them ; she had 
oecome as one plague stricken, she was hunted down by 
Church and King, she could not ask a draught of water 
from a peasant, or bid his help to bear her lover under a 
shealing’s shelter; the very reeds and grasses trodden in 
their flight might tell their coarse and betray their resting- 
place, the very moments might be numbered in which she 
could even watch beside him here unpursued, unarrested. 
Though he perished before her sight, she could not reach 
for him even the succor of a beggar’s wallet, or a chaicoal- 
burner’s roof. 

The linen of the fishing-shirt had fallen open on his 


“stoop down and seem to kiss me ERE I DIE.” 391 

breast, and by the flickering light shed downward through 
the leaves she saw where the blows had fallen fast as hail 
upon his chest, that was strong as any corslet of steel, but 
blackened and beaten by them like the steel after a long 
close battle ; his head had sunk back, he had reeled down 
senseless from exhaustion ; through the crushed arums the 
slender stream of the blood still flowed till the snowy cups 
were filled with it as though they were purpled by wine ; 
she had looked many a time on death, and death seemed 
to her on his face now as it had done when beneath the 
mountain pines she had first seen the carrion-birds waiting 
and hovering above his sightless eyes. 

For the moment she had no strength, no consciousness 
to seek to save him ; she knelt beside him, knowing nothing 
save that through her he too must be sacrificed, that for 
her this life also had been laid down, uncounting its own 
loss, yielding up its breath without reproach, forced nobly 
on to perish in her defense as the bold fealty of a dog 
forces itself to share the blow aimed at its lord, and falls 
by it, content if so its lord be saved. She stooped over 
him, with that look in her eyes with which she had gazed 
’ down on the lifeless frame of Carlo of Yiana, only that 
now, beside remorse there was a grief and a passion deeper 
yet, even while softer, than remorse alone. That gaze, 
though he lay senseless under it, seemed to have power 
upon him still, as when first under the Danubian sea-pines 
it had been bent on him in the glow and fullness of the 
noon, never again to be forgotten. His eyes, blind and 
seeing nothing but the dark swaying motion of the leaves 
and the stars that burned down through the vault of gloom 
above, still instinctively looked upward seeking hers. A 
heavy sigh heaved his breast, — a sigh in which words 
brokenly rose to his lips and died. 

“ Leave me. I entreat you — save yourself.” 

His one thought was still of her ; his one instinct still 
was for her. A quiver shook her from head to foot, as 
fear, and danger, and the pressure of the poisoned steel 
against her bosom had had no strength to shake her grand 
and fearless courage. He was faithful to her thus — to the 
last — and she had given him no recompense save this — to 
die for her. 


39 : 


IDAL1A. 


Her bead bowed its haughty royalty downward and 
downward until her brow rested on his breast, and her 
hands drew his within them against the beating of her 
heart. 

“Oh, truest, noblest !” she murmured, “I know it now. 
I love you, if love be any worth. ” 

Through the sickening delirium in which his mind was 
floating, through the darkness that closed on sight and 
sense, and seemed to him, as to her, the presaging shad- 
ows of dissolution, the words reached, the touch thrilled 
him, with an electric shock, a sweetness of hope so wild, 
so rich, so breathless, that it called him back to conscious- 
ness, as in the priestly legends the touch of the anointing 
chrism has summoned the soul to earth. 

He raised himself slightly with convulsive strength, a 
living warmth flushed the bloodless weariness of his feat- 
ures, his eyes strained through the dimness that swam be- 
fore them with eager effort to regain their sight. 

“Say it again !” he whispered, with that terrible doubt 
still in his look of one who fears the joy he touches will 
vanish mocking him. “ Say it once more — once more J” 

Through the mist before his vision, through the black- 
ness of the forest shades, through the haze of flickering fo- 
liage, and watery moonlight, and stars that seemed to 
stoop and touch the earth, he saw the divine eyes bending 
over him grow humid, lustrous, gentle with an infinite gen- 
tleness. 

“ Say that I love you ? Yes — I say it now.” 

The words were low, soft, slowly uttered ; proud still, 
for in them she yielded far, but tender with a tenderness 
the deeper for that pride which stooped, not without lin- 
gering reluctance still, to own itself disarmed. The glory 
that shone one moment on his face she had never seen save 
in her youth’s earliest dreams of the glory on the faces of 
the gods; for — let the world lie of her as it would — to 
none had she ever spoken as she spoke now to him, while 
her voice was sweet as sorcery and filled with unshed tears 
that would not gather in her eyes, but were driven back to 
her heart in bitter, aching grief that mingled with the 
poignancy of softer thoughts and tenderness unloosed at 
last. 


“WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON?” 393 

“ Yes — I love you. Know it now — it is a poor reward; 
and comes too late for both.” 

Then, at last, the passion of its ecstasy reached him, 
and he knew that it was truth — truth that rushed through 
him like the wild potence of some eastern drug, burning, 
blinding, lulling every sense like opium-mingled wine. He 
lifted himself from where he lay, he stretched his arms out 
to her, he strove with futile agonized effort to strain his 
gaze through the mists of pain, to free his strength from 
ihe bonds of exhaustion; and once more it was in vain — - 
once more he fell back, powerless, senseless, yet with his 
thoughts keeping their hold on their one memory of her, 
and still with that glow as of light upon his face. His 
lips moved faintly in words that scarcely stirred the grave- 
like silence of the deep oak-woods : 

“0 God ! if it be love — not pity — stoop down and kiss 
me once.” 

She was silent awhile, looking motionless upon him in 
the gray, fitful, shadowy haze, that was dusky and dark- 
ened by the massive canopy of foliage above ; then — with 
a faint flush rising over the weary fairness of her face — 
lower and lower she drooped her noble, imperial head, and 
let the warmth and fragrance of her lips rest in the answer 
that he prayed for on his own. 


CHAPTER XXYI. 

“WHY MUST I ’NEATII THE LEAVES OF CORONAL PRESS 
ANY KISS OF PARDON ON THY BROW?” 

The earliest dawn had broken eastward, where the mount- 
ains stretched — the dawn of a southern summer, that al- 
most touches the sunset of the past night — but under the 
dense shadows of the old woods that had sheltered the 
mystic rites of Gnostics and echoed with the Latin hymns 
to Pan, no light wandered. There was only a dim silvery 
haze, that seemed to float over the whiteness of the tall- 


394 


IDALIA. 


stemmed aram lilies and the foam bells of the water that 
here and there glimmered under the rank vegetation, where 
it had broken from its hidden channels up to air and space. 
Not a sound disturbed the intense stillness; that the night 
waned and the world wakened, brought no change to the 
solitudes that men had forgotten, and only the memories of 
the dead-deserted gods still haunted in the places of their 
lost temples, whose columns were now the sea- pines’ stems, 
and on whose fallen altars and whose shattered sculptures 
the lizard made her shelter and the wind-sown grasses 
seeded and took root. Of the once graceful marble beauty 
and the incense-steeped stones of sacrifice, nothing re- 
mained but moss-grown shapeless fragments, buried beneath 
a pall of leaves by twice a thousand autumns. Yet the 
ancient sanctity still rested on the nameless, pathless woods ; 
the breath of an earlier time, of a younger season of the 
earth, seemed to lie yet upon the untroubled forest ways; 
the whisper of the unseen waters had a dream-like, unreal 
cadence ; in the deep shade, in the warm fragrance and the 
heavy gloom, there was a voluptuous yet mournful charm — 
the world seemed so far, the stars shone so near, there were 
the sweetness of rest and the oblivion of passion. 

When her lips had touched his, life had seemed to re- 
turn to him ; he lay in a trance vague as a rapturous dream. 
He was powerless to answer her, save by his eyes ; he had 
no consciousness, save the one sense of a joy that in its 
intensity was half delirium ; he had no memory, save that 
he held himself dying, and felt death glorious, divine, wel- 
come as the richest life that ever poured its golden wine 
out in the sunlight of youth — felt like the lover who, slaugh- 
tered at his mistress’s feet and learning by his fall her love, 
murmured with his latest words, 

It was ordained to be so sweet, and best 
Comes now, beneath thine eyes and on thy breast, 

Still kiss me! Care not for the cowards ! Care 
Only to put aside thy beauteous hair 
My blood will hurt. 

Stretched there motionless, strengthless, seeing only the 
gaze of her eyes in the dimness, and feeling the depth of 
the solitude in which their lives were alone, as in the awful 
stillness of the desert, he knew not vet whether this was 


“WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON?” 395 

truth, or whether dying visions mocked him — whether this 
spiritual stillness round him, this madness of incredulous 
hope, this breath of whispered words that fanned his hair, 
this caress that burned one moment on his lips, were not 
the mere phantoms of vain desires dreaming of the joys 
denied to them forever. For awhile Idalia let him lie 
thus, with his head sunk back against her heart, and his 
eyes alone speaking as they gazed up with their doglike 
fidelity their unutterable passion: she had no thought now 
that this was death which had come to him; she knew that 
he would live as surely as though with that answer to his 
prayer she had breathed back the certainty of existence 
upun his lips; and she knelt there silent and immovable, 
letting the moments drift on, forgetful alike of time, of dan- 
ger, of flight, and of pursuit ; remembering no more than 
if they had never been, alike the agony that was of the 
past, and the jeopardy that was still of the future. Ou the 
dauntless Greek courage — the courage of Marathon that 
had revived in her — peril had frail and passing hold : and 
in the deep bosom of these untracked and classic wood- 
lands all sense of mortal fear seemed lost in their profound 
peace, their nameless melancholy, their ethereal lulling 
charm. 

At last, as though smitten suddenly with the sharp iron 
of recollection, she moved from him, rose, and went from 
the great oak shelter where he lay. 

“Love! love! What have I to do with love?” she 
murmured, wearily, bitterly, as she leaned her arms on the 
broken slab of the old stone altar, and let her head droop 
downward on them. A flood of memories, a tide of thought 
rushed on her from the years of her past; on the impulses 
of a gratitude touched to the core by the fealty and devo- 
tion of his defense, she had let words escape her that pride 
had silenced, and weightier chains fettered for so long, 
that she would have taken her oath no pity for him would 
ever shake, no yielding in herself would ever lead her to 
revoke, the decree of severance from her forever, which she 
had uttered unfalteringly on the night by the Capri sea. 
It was done; he knew now that she gave him back some 
measure at least of that passion wherewith he adored her. 
She gave him love — she who had held it with so superb a 


398 


IDALTA. 


disdain as the dalliance of fools, or the sensualism of lib* 
ertines; she who used the whole power of its empire but 
as a weapon, a mask, a snare, a means scorned in itself for 
ends nearer her heart and worthier the consecration of her 
thoughts than she deemed that any single life could ever 
become to her. For the first time — whatever calumny 
might say, or vain jealousy upbraid her with — for the 
first time the softness of this passion had touched her, 
and its caress been given by her. She had made a slave 
of its madness many a time, or lashed it into fury when 
she needed, as the priestesses of ancient Syracuse, tamed 
or enraged the desert beasts they crowned with flowers 
only later on to lead them out to sacrifice. That she would 
ever render it back, that she would ever feel to it other 
emotion than a half contemptuous compassion, had seemed 
impossible to her for so long. Moreover, when of late 
some sense of its tenderness had stolen on her, some echo 
in her own heart been awakened to the strong vibrations 
of his, she had known that the bonds which bound her 
could never be loosened, and she had told herself that she 
had no title to, no fitness for, a noble and unsullied homage. 

Where she leaned now against the ruined altar-stones, 
remorse, keen as though their love were guilt, weighed on 
her. He had justly won his right to all of joy, of honor, 
and of peace, that she could give the liberator and defender 
of her life ; he had been willing to purchase liberty for her 
at loss of all things to himself ; he had merited the tender- 
ness she had yielded to him by chivalrous service which no 
gratitude rendered could repay : and she knew that, in all 
likelihood, the sole reward her love would bring to him 
would be a violent death by shot or steel; she knew that 
the more truly, the more deeply he was loved by her, the 
more inevitably would the price of her love be to him a 
fate as merciless as the blow his Abruzzian foe had dealt at 
him that night. An exceeding bitterness came on her — a 
heart-sickness of regret. Why had not he come to her in 
the early years of her youth ? Why had not this passion, 
since at last it reached her, been wakened in her while yet 
it would have sufficed to her, while yet it would have had 
no shadow cast upon it from the past, while yet no self- 
reproach, no weariness of doubt, no fever of reckless am* 


“WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OE PARDON?” 397 

bition, and no darkness of untold bondage, of fettered 
action, of dead memories, would have stretched between 
them ? The poignancy of that cruel remembrance, “ too 
late,” which had passed over her when she had leaned 
against her prison casement, and seen him look npward in 
the tawny torrid heat of the monastic marshes, was with 
her now. 

She had told him that he was dear to her, and she knew 
him to be so; knew that she could go to his side and 
promise him a love that should be no mockery and no 
treachery, but a living truth, deep and warm, and rooted 
fast in honor. She had known many who, in other things, 
equaled or far surpassed him ; she had known every splen- 
dor of intellect, every dignity of power, every brilliance of 
fascination in the men of every country who had been about 
her in so many changing throngs, but none among them 
had touched her as the singleness and the self-sacrifice of 
Erceldoune’s devotion touched her, and none had roused 
in her the mingled pity and reverence which the hopeless- 
ness of his passion and the chivalry of his character had 
roused in her almost from the first moment of their inter- 
course. There was a bold, free magnificence of manhood ; 
there was a lofty, fearless, superb reading of honor and its 
bonds ; there was a noble simplicity and an antique gran- 
deur in the cast of his nature that had wen from her what 
she had never felt to those among her lovers who had 
charmed her with an intellect a thousand times more subtle, 
wooed her with a dominion infinitely more commanding 
than his could ever have been, even had the fortunes of his 
race never fallen as they had done, or the pursuits of a 
statesman’s glories ever been possible to the untamed Border 
blood. When in the gloom of the monastery'?? corridors, 
with a hundred human tigers thirsty for slaughter swarm- 
ing from their dens, she had been guarded by his 9>rms and 
shielded on his breast, his heart had wakened her own with 
its quick beating ; when in the darkness of the night she 
had made him pledge his word to serve her by a death-shot 
if to give her freedom from dishonor otherwise were for- 
bidden him, she had felt to this man, whose eyes answered 
hers in comprehension of that loathing of captivity, that 
disdain of the terrors of the grave, what was nearer akin 

34 


395 


ID ALT A. 


to reverence than the imperial temper of Idalia had ever 
yielded to any. 

He had so far won his way to her at last ; severance 
would have scarce been more misery to him than to ner 
now, and the proud sorceress of the Silver Ivy would have 
been content that wealth, and power, and sovereignty, and 
all the changeful triumphs of her career, should drift from 
her, so that only his gaze should look ever with that loyal 
worship into hers, so that only her past could be so pure 
and cloudless in her own sight and his that no poison-mists 
should ever rise from it before him, so that only she were 
free to bid him, without any hidden thing between them, 
look in her inmost heart and see his empire there unshad- 
owed and unshared. 

“ Ho loves me — yes ! As no man, I think, loved me 
yet,” she thought. “ But he loves me because he believes 
in me. How long should I reign with him if he knew? — 
if he knew 1” 

That was the iron weight on her, which made her whole 
frame sink with that fettered worn-out fatigue and desola- 
tion against the ivy-covered stones in the motionless musing 
that succeeded to the breathless, fearless intoxication of 
danger and of flight. It would not have been possible to 
her to do as many weaker and less truthful natures do — 
seek shelter in self- evasion, and turn the very nobility and 
trust of the man who loved her into the withes to bind 
him, and the band to blind him. It would not have been 
possible to her to stoop and touch his lips with hers, if on 
hers there was ever to be for him the shame of falsehood 
or the disgrace of subterfuge. When once she had an- 
swered him with that caress he prayed, when once she had 
murmured to him, “I love you I” she had acknowledged to 
herself his right that there should never be one thing in 
her past or her present screened from him, one truth veiled, 
one act distorted. And on her silence was bound ; either 
way, withholding all or giving all the records of her past, 
she saw herself a traitress to her creed of truth and justice 
— a traitress alike to others and herself. 

Lost in thought, and weakened now more than she knew 
by her captivity, by the scant coarse food and noxious air 
of her prison-house, and by the wild speed of the length- 


“WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON?” 399 

ened headlong midnight ride, she sat there in the still deep 
shadows of the oak glades, with the faint gray hue of the 
young day serving but to deepen into blacker somberness 
the colonnades of trees. She had left him on the sudden 
sting of many memories — memories which made it deadly 
to her pride to have bent thus to passion and to pity — 
memories which recalled to her that she had no right to 
bind in with her own the fate of one who brought to her 
the loyalty of perfect faith in her nature, the defenseless- 
ness of perfect ignorance of her past. She had done him 
evil enough ; she had saved his life once, only to chain it 
so to hers that its doom must be whatever her own became ; 
for her he had risked liberty, existence, everything save 
honor, ungrudgingly, and with the lavish largesse of a 
princely giver, who would have held no gift as any worth, 
no suffering as any sacrifice ; now — at the last — she had 
surrendered her love to him, and listened to his own. She 
knew that there were thousands who would tell him that 
this was the darkest evil of all that, through her, had be- 
fallen him. And at her heart ached a burning, endless, 
futile pain, rather for him than for herself, though for her- 
self there was sharp anguish in the knowledge that she had 
loved him so well that she had slandered her own fame to 
give herself to his scorn, and spare him one pang at least 
if it were possible; yet that the world would tell him all 
love rendered from her could be but a graceful lie to fool 
him to his- peril, an eloquent simulation to cheat him into 
misery, a mockery, hollow as it was beguiling, to draw him 
downward, Circe-like, to his destruction. 

Her head was sunk on her hands ; her thoughts had 
drifted far in that vague, unreal musing which comes after 
long fasting and severe exertion ; she was unconscious that 
he followed her wistfully with his gaze, like a dog, as she 
left him, and slowly, staggeringly, after awhile, rose, 
steadying himself by the boles of the oak trunks, and came 
toward her with the dizziness of his wound still on him, 
but the ardent glow and the bewildered doubt of feverish 
joy warm on his face and eager in his glance. She was 
unconscious, even, that he was near till his hand touched 
her ; then, as she started at the touch, she once again for- 
got that the world held any other than his life and hers. 


400 


ID ALIA. 


Stooping, he looked down into her eyes ; a look so long- 
ing, so incredulous, so straining with hope and fear, as a 
man might give into the deep brown depths of fathomless 
waters in whose light he sees some long-lost priceless jewel 
gleaming. 

“ Is it true ?” 

As his voice quivered on the words he read its truth ; 
doubt was no longer with him in its torture as he gazed 
down on her face ; but with a cry from his very heart, a 
cry of the sheer agony of joy, he drew her in his arms as 
he had held her against the onslaught of her foes ; he gave 
back that one caress with breathless kisses on her lips and 
brow ; he forgot danger, and pain, and all things upon 
earth, save that this woman he worshiped was his in all 
her splendid grace, in all her sovereign loveliness ; the 
world reeled round him — he felt blind, and drunk, and mad. 
And Idalia for the instant made him no resistance, but let 
her beauty lie in the arms that so well had shielded it, and 
let her head rest upon the breast that had been as a buck- 
ler rained on by a thousand blows between her and her 
enemies. 

This trance of sweet forgetfulness, this momentary ban- 
ishment of every bitter thing, she at least could give him, 
and he had earned his right to it. For the moment, also, 
she, too, shared it ; she felt nothing but the softness, the 
silence, the voluptuous abandonment of the emotion so 
long contemptuously discredited and unswervingly re- 
pressed as owning any power to sway or move her 
heart. 

Then slowly, and with her old proud reluctance to yield 
to so much weakness blent with a deeper and a keener 
pain, she drew herself gently from him, yet still let her 
head, that never had bent before the savage lust of Giulio 
Villaflor’s tiger glance or at the uplifted scourge of his 
ecclesiastics, droop on his haud with a gesture that was 
little less than humiliation, than remorse. 

“ Do not thank me for my love. The world will tell 
you it is worthless, and can have no strength save to de- 
stroy.” 

For all answer he sank down at her feet, his arms about 
her still, his hands on hers, his eyes looking upward to her 


“WIIY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OP PARDON ?” 401 

own with such a radiance in them as she had never seen in 
any human gaze. 

“ Destroy me as you will, so that you love me !” 

Mad words ; — she had heard many such, yet they had 
never borne the meaning to her that these bore to her now. 
A shudder passed over her as she heard, a chillness of ioy 
cold that the burning of his kisses on her hands could not 
warm. She knew it might well be that nothing save ruin 
might come to him through her. She stooped toward him, 
and her lips quivered a little as the answer stole from 
them. 

“Well, many will tell you that no other fate can ever 
come to you from me.” 

“ Whoever does will find his lie his last word.” 

“ But — if I say so ?” 

He smiled — the same smile which she had seen upon his 
face when he had first looked up at her under the pines of 
the Carpathian pass. 

“ I have answered. Do what you will, since you have 
blessed me thus.” 

“ Blessed you ? God knows ! ” 

Slow tears welled into her eyes as she saw his own so 
full of longing lustrous eloquence, where he gazed at her 
in the faintness of the waking day that left the forest gloom 
and forest hush around them. Ilis trust was so sweet to 
her, and yet so bitter ; sweet because she knew that her 
heart gave it the answer it believed and sought, bitter be- 
cause she knew that her past could never merit it or meet 
it. She passed her hand softly over his forehead with a 
gesture that from her had deeper tenderness than far more 
passionate demonstration from natures more yielding and 
less proud. 

“ What you have suffered for me 1” she murmured. 
“ What you have done and dared ! You merit my whole 
life’s dedication for such love — such service. And — that 
life is so little worthy you.” 

The woman who so late had fronted Giulio Villaflor with 
so superb a resistance, so defiant a disdain ; the woman 
who had laughed at the threats and the prayers of her 
lovers, as of her foes, with so cold and so careless a con- 
tempt ; the woman who had been tranquil before death, 
2 A 34 * 


402 


IDALIA. 


pitiless in power, victorious against outrage, and without 
mercy in fascination, felt abased, heart-stricken, smitten 
with a weary shame, before the loyal gaze of the man who 
held her life as the most valued and most stainless gift the 
world could hold for him. To a nature integrally truthful 
and integrally noble, however warped by circumstance or 
error, the deadliest sting, the surest awakener of remorse, 
will always lie in the perfect faith of another’s implicit 
confidence ; steeled to venom, careless of censure, and con- 
temptuous of rebuke, it will bend, contrite and self-accus- 
ing, before the fidelity and clearness of one regard that 
vows a simple and unsullied belief through all and against 
all. 

He doubted that he heard her rightly; to him it seemed 
that he had no earthly thing or claim by which to win her; 
and he held his service in her cause no more deserving of 
her care than he held the wolf-hound’s at her feet. 

“Worthy of meV ’ he echoed, his voice still faint with 
exhaustion, but breathless with the incredulous joy that 
seemed to make tenfold strength flow back into his limbs, 
tenfold force arm him steel-clad to save her. “ Oh, my 
life, my empress, my wife ! — what am I that I should ever 
share one thought of yours 

She started slightly; a flush of warmth passed over the 
paleness of her face ; a half smile came on her lips, sad 
yet doubtful, wondering yet reverent. 

“You would make me your wife — still ?” 

She spoke almost dreamily, with a touch of questioning 
doubt in her words as in her smile, while at the same time 
there returned to her something of that negligence of 
hauteur, something of that royalty of challenge, which were 
as inherent in her as though she had worn the crowns of 
empires. 

“ I would ? You ask it ? Do you not know that I feel 
mad with the mere license only to touch your hand with 
mine ? And — what insult do you think that I can mean to 
dare to offer you ?” 

“ None.” 

She looked at him full in the eyes, with a tenderness in- 
finitely melancholy, a gaze intense in its calm unspoken 
thought. The single word spoke better than whole phrases 


“WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OP PARDON V J 408 

could have done, alike her knowledge that no insult could 
have been tendered to herself, and that none would ever 
have been possible from him. 

“ Then why, in God's name, such a doubt ?” 

She smiled slightly, with something of her old delicate 
irony, her own contemptuous, unsparing cynicism, which 
never was more unsparing than to herself. 

“ Why ? Well, the answer was not sure, or would not 
have been, rather, if you were as other men. What do 
you know of me ? Where have you lived, if you have not 
heard my name coupled with evil ? Why should you deem 
so much scruple needful with a woman whom you found a 
conspirator in chains — a prisoner, degraded to the mercy 
of Monsignore Villaflor ?” 

A great darkness swept over her face as she spoke her 
persecutor’s name, though through the bitterness and 
mournfulness of all her speech there ran the vein of reck- 
less, careless, satirical disdain, which had grown to be as 
her second nature in many things, and had so long been 
used as her surest veil to every deeper unacknowledged 
feeling. 

The wistful uncertain pain which that tone had ever 
brought into his look was in it now, as he stooped toward 
her ; he felt that he had no comprehension, but he was 
content — with that magnificent folly which is so noble in 
its rash unwisdom — that he loved her, and believed in her. 

“ I know nothing of your life — true. But make it one 
with mine, and I shall hold it as the divinest gift on earth; 
and if any dare calumniate it, they will find their reckon- 
ing with me. Oh, my love, my mistress, my idol ! only 
give me the title to defend your honor against the whole 
world !” 

The tears stood once more in her eyes as she heard the 
prayer, to which the tremor in his voice gave a yet deeper 
pathos — a yet more imploring eagerness. She grew paler 
still as she heard ; her lips quivered, a sigh from her 
heart’s depths ran through her. The more faith he lavished 
on her, the more sublimely mad the blindness of his chivalry, 
the more heavily self-rebuke smote her, the farther the iron 
entered into her soul, and the farther she stood in her own 
sight from any fitness with this man’s noble simplicity of 


404 


ID ALIA. 


trust. She bent toward him, leaning her head one moment 
on his hands, where he stood above her — that bright-haired 
pride-crowned head, that had borne itself with such impe- 
rial courage above the massacre of Antina, above the 
priestly herd of the monastic hall, lowered with the abase- 
ment of a brave and erring nature, struck to the core with 
self-chastisement, and refusing to accept one shade of wor- 
ship of which it knew itself unworthy. 

“ Listen !” she said, softly, while a bitterness, that was 
to herself not to him, lent a strange thrill and force to the 
low-murmured words — “ listen ! I have said I love you — 
love you as I never thought to love — my noblest, bravest, 
best ! But it is because I do, that I tell you I am un- 
worthy of your generous faith — that I tell you there had 
better be separation between us now and forever. I will 
not urge on you to leave me because while with me you 
share my danger. You are too brave to be insulted with 
such a plea ; but I do say, forget that I have ever con- 
fessed you have grown dear to me, abaudon every hope 
that I can bring you any happiness ; do as I bade you 
when last we parted — hate me, scorn me, condemn me, if 
you will; do anything, save trust your happiness to me! 
There are many women who can lay bare their hearts to 
you like an open book, make one of them the holder of 
your honor, they alone merit it, and I am not among them. 
Who can know me as I know myself? Believe me, then, 
when I tell you the greatest cruelty I can do to you is to 
bestow on you my love.” 

He heard her silently; but not as he had heard her bid 
him leave her and condemn her the last night they had 
stood together above the sea at Capri. He knew now 
that she loved him; knowing that, he refused to take a 
decree of divorce between them, even from her lips ; he 
claimed a title that he would never surrender, though 
through years he should vainly assert his right to it. The 
strong passion and the stanch patience of his nature were 
welded together, persistent and invulnerable. 

“ Let me judge that,” he said, simply. “ If I preferred 
misery at your hands, rather than paradise at any other’s, 
I should have the right to make the choice.” 

“ Yes, and I the right to guard you from the fruits of 


“WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON ?” 405 

your own madness. You love me with a love that needs 
an angel to i:*} worthy of it; and I — I have thought of 
late, that if tlwse tyrants yonder had knelled me under the 
worst tortures they could frame, they would have done on 
me no more than my just due; they would only fittingly 
have avenged all those who died by shot and steel through 
me.” 

“What is your life, then ?” 

His voice sank very low, his face was very colorless, as 
he leaned over her. Believe even her own witness against 
her he did not. would not; but he knew that some dark 
thread ran through her life’s golden web — he knew that 
some deadly remorse underlay the brilliancy of her gifts 
and of her sway, and beyond these he knew nothing of it — « 
no more than he knew of the track, and the spring, and 
the destiny of the unseen waters that wound their way be- 
neath the herbage and the lilies at his feet, whether down- 
ward to nethermost depths of gloom, or outward to the 
fair freedom of the sea — none had told, or ever would tell. 

“ What is it ?” she repeated, dreamily. “ Well, beyond 
all, it is a long regret.” 

“Mauy regret who are but the prey of others.” 

“ Perhaps; but my regret is — remorse.” 

“ Well, may not even that oftentimes be noble ?” 

She gave a gesture of dissent, while the smile that had 
in it more sadness than* tears though it had also her old 
careless satire in it, passed a moment over her face. 

“You bade me once not ask you to turn sophist for my 
sake. Do not turn so now. You have your own bold 
broad creeds of simple honor and dishonor ; keep to them; 
men wander too far from them into subtle windings now.” 

His teeth clinched on his beard with an agony of impo- 
tent impatience. 

“ O God ! do not trifle with philosophies now I Answer 
me straightly, for the pity of Heaven ; what is your life 
that you repent it thus ?” 

“ I cannot tell you wholly. It is enough that it has for- 
feited all right to such a trust as yours.” 

“Nay, let me judge that, I say again. Let me judge 
Ully — givo me your confidence, your history ; did I not 
swear to you that the caro es would never change my 


406 


IDALIA* 


fealty ? I love you , my sovereign, my sorcercess I What 
matters it to me whence you come, what you bring V ’ 

His voice, that had been grave with a gentle command 
as he spoke the first words, sank down to the hot, vehe- 
ment, reckless utterance of a love that was ready to take, 
risk, suffer, and imperil all things so that only the sweet- 
ness of her lips close once again on his, so that only the 
gift of her loveliness was yielded to him one hour. 

She rose, and looked him once more in the eyes, with a 
serene, fathomless gaze of that pity and that reverence 
which blent strangely and intricately in the feeling she bore 
toward this man who was at once her slave and her de- 
fender. 

“No,” she said slowly; “it would matter nothing to you 
if you sought me as your mistress ; but — as your wife ? 
You told me once the stainlessness of your name was the 
only inheritance that you still held from your ancestors.” 

He gave a short, sharp sigh as though a knife had been 
plunged into the nerves that his wound had laid bare; her 
words bore but one significance to him. Ere she had time 
to resist, his arms were round her; he crushed her against 
his breast, he looked down into her eyes with a terrible 
longing prayer. 

“Answer me,” he said, hoarsely ; “answer me yes or no, 
or you will kill me, and forgive me if the question is an 
outrage — you madden me tiil I must ask it. Is there any 
shame in your past life that forbids you to hold and keep 
a husband’s honor ?” 

The last words sunk so low that they scarcely stirred 
the silence as they stole to her ; for the moment she was 
silent; her head drooped on his bosom, her lips were 
breathless, voiceless ; she longed for his sake to sever him 
from all communion with her, she desired for his sake to 
bid him leave forever one who must withhold from him all 
he had the just right to seek in the records of her past; she 
hesitated one instant whether she should not render herself 
up to his utmost abhorrence, that by this means, since none 
other could avail, he would be parted from her fate for 
evermore. Almost she chose the sacrifice; she had 
strength far passing that of women, and she had the gen- 
ex ous self-abandonment of a nature which scorned self-pity, 


“WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON ?” 407 

and — once bending to love — loved nobly. She was silent ; 
then as she looked up and saw the gaze wherewith he 
watched that silence which wrote on her a condemnation 
deadlier to him than words could ever have uttered, her 
courage forsook her, she had no force to yield herself up 
to his hatred and his loathing; to let him believe this of 
her was to let him be made desolate by a lie, and all the 
proud regal temper of her race arose and refused to bear 
falsely the yoke of shame even to save him, even to do to- 
ward him what she deemed her duty and his defense. She 
lifted her head, and looked him once again fully in the 
eyes, calmly, unflinchingly, though a flush of warmth came 
over her face. 

“ Nothing — in your sense. But in mine much.” 

“ Thank God ! — thank God ! Against the world, against 
ail destiny, ay, even against yourself, you shall be mine 1” 

He had never heard the last words ; the first sufficed to 
make the wild joy course like fire through his veins, to light 
the future with the glory of unutterable gladness, to give 
her to him then and forever ; his own, let all the earth 
stand against them, or let her own will forbid him her 
beauty and her tenderness as she would. The one agonized 
dread that had stifled him as with a hand of ice through 
the last moments was gone ; he feared no other thing — 
not even death, since if that smote her it should strike him 
with the same blow. 

He would not release her from his embrace; he held her 
there, with the loosened trail of her hair floating over his 
chest and his ceaseless kisses on her lips; he forgot that 
very hour of their lives might be numbered, that they had 
just broken from a prison, and a grave that might yawn 
afresh for them, and inclose them beyond hope ere even 
another day had passed; that he knew no mo i, eof her past 
now than he had known when first her hand had held the 
curled leaf filled with water to his parching lips* in the Car- 
pathian woods ; he heeded nothing, remembered nothing, 
asked nothing, since her eyes had told him more surely yet 
than her words that no shame rested on her to divorce her 
in the sole sense in which he would accept shame to have 
the power to part them. It was neither the world’s ca- 
lumnious breath, nor the slander of rivaled lovers, that 


408 


IDALlA. 


could have terrors for tlie man who had p‘erced his way to 
her through dungeon walls, and torn off her the leopard 
fangs of Griulio Villaflor, and fought his passage with her 
through leveled weapons, and the storm of blows, and the 
battle of the hot Italian night. It was not for libel or for 
lie that he would surrender her — he who had thrown his 
manhood and his life on one reckless venture to secure her 
freedom, on one uncounted stake to touch her hand 
again. 

While he had believed that he was no more to her than 
the hound beside them — nay, scarce so much — he had been 
content to hold his silence, to save her without thought of 
recompense, to obey her implicitly, and to hold her as high 
above him as the morning stars that, through the dawn, 
shone in the blue heights above the forest. But now that 
once he knew she loved him, it would have been easier to 
shake off a lion from his desert foe, when once the desert 
rage was at its height, than to force him to yield up the 
claim that her love gave him to Idalia. 

“I knew it — I knew it !” he murmured, as he stooped 
his head over her, and wondered even yet whether this 
were aught but the sweet vain mockery of some mandra- 
gora-given dream. “ Dishonor with you ! — it were impos- 
sible. Ah, God ! why will you belie yourself with such 
self-condemnation ? — you who are noblest among women — 
who chose death rather than that villain’s touch?” 

“ Hush 1 that was nothing. I should have been false 
indeed to all the traditions of my race if I had had fear of 
that moment’s pang which the Pagan world held the signal 
of release — which Christians alone have raised into a gi- 
gantic nameless terror. But” — she drew herself from his 
arms as she spoke, and stood with the dignity that had 
awed even her Roman captor, blent with an infinitely 
gentler sadness than had ever been upon her — “ do not 
cheat yourself with thinking that I have no errors on me. 
I have grave ones, dark ones. In your sense, it is true, 
there is nothing to part us ; but in my own conscience there 
is much to make me unfit forever for such love as you be- 
stow. See! I tell you that those men died at Antina 
through my work ; I tell you that many more lives than 
theirs have been lost, sent to their graves by me; I tell 


“WIIY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON?” 409 

you that I have made all men who fell beneath my sway 
serve me for one end, not a mean one, indeed, but one to 
which I sacrificed everything and every one ruthlessly, and 
did more ruin than you ever dream, or I could ever 
measure. I tell you that the chief of my history must re- 
main hidden from you — for awhile, at least; perhaps for- 
ever; and that if you had lived less in your wandering 
freedom and more in the intrigue of cities, you would have 
heard every evil, every danger, every unsparing sorcery, 
and every pitiless unscrupulousness attributed to my name, 
and — for the most part — rightly. Now, knowing this for 
the mere outline of a deadly truth, you can scarce call me 
‘noblest among women,’ and you will be mad if into my 
hands you yield your future. Believe me, and fly from me 
while you may.” 

She stretched her hands out to him with a gesture of 
farewell, that had in it an exceeding tenderness ; she loved 
him well enough to do for him what she had done for no 
other — save him from his own passions, spare him from 
herself. 

He took her hands in his, and laid his lips on them in 
one long kiss; then lifted his head and raised his eyes to 
her with a regard in which a feeling far deeper than the 
mere voluptuous fervor of the senses, blent with a loyalty 
grave and calm as that of one who pledges his life, not 
lightly, but witting what he does — looked at her softly 
and thoughtfully. 

“ That is idle ; I will never leave you now while there is 
breath in me. It may be that you have that which you 
repent of ; few women have such sorcery as yours, and use 
it wholly blamelessly ; but what I trust, is not your past 
but your future, and what I ask, is not your secret but 
your love. It is too late to speak of our ever parting; I 
will make you mine in the teeth of all, even of your own 
will, now that once you have let me know that your heart 
is with me. And — my love, my queen, my idol ! — do you 
not think that I have tenderness enough in me to pardon 
much, if there be aught to pardon? Do you not think 
that I have jnstice enough to hold you in higher honor for 
your noble truth than I could ever hold the pale, poor, 
feckless virtue that should have no stain because it has no 

35 


uo 


ID ALTA. 


glory, and had never fallen in any path because it followed 
coldly the straight one of self-interest? Oh, Idalia ! — 1 
can bring nothing worthy your genius and your loveliness, 
save a straight stroke to free you and a whole strength to 
love you ; but since you have no scorn for those, take my 
future now and forever — I trust you as no man ever 
trusted woman.’’ 

He spoke from his inmost soul — spoke with that vivid, 
simple eloquence which came to him in moments of in- 
tense feeling ; and it stirred her heart as none had ever 
stirred -it ; no qualities could have won the reverence of 
her wayward, dominant, and world-worn nature, as it was 
won by his chivalrous dignity of faith, his absolute refusal 
of the ignoble shame of suspicion. It broke down her 
force ; it moved her to a sudden sweetness and warmth of 
utterance that he had not heard since that moment when 
she had stooped and touched his lips with her caress. 

“Ah, my love, my love !” she murmured ; “ it is not 
that. I will never forsake you ; I will never betray you ; 

it is that my past, that my present But since you will 

it so, be it so. I will break my chains for you, and lay 
down my evil sway forever. Call me your wife if you 
will ; no wife shall dare for any, what I will dare for your 
sake 1” 

Then she let her head droop once more on his bosom, 
and wound her arms about him, and listened to the loud 
rapturous beating of his heart against her own, where 
they stood alone in the hushed twilight of the awakening 
day. And he only thought that the horrors of the past 
night were still upon her, and stronger even than her he- 
roic strength, when a dreamy imperial smile passed one 
instant on her face, and her lips murmured with half di r 
dain, with infinite tenderness, — 

“ Let them kill me if they will. I will be yours ere I 
die.” 


THE STORY OF THE PAST. 


411 


CHAPTER XXYIL 

THE STORY OF THE PAST. 

When the morning rose higher, and its light shone full 
on both their faces, his was warm, brilliant, eager with 
passionate delight ; hers was grave, weary, very color- 
less. To him a very Eden opened ; on her a thousand 
memories weighed. The one saw but the future; the 
other was pursued with the past. He knew that he had 
gained the only life that made his worth the living ; she 
knew that she had drawn in with her own the only one 
that she had ever eared to save. 

“Ah God ! I bring you already only ill,” she murmured, 
as the rays of the risen day, half shadowed still beneath 
the oak leafage, recalled to them that they were fugitives 
— fugitives from pursuers never yet known to spare. 
“You are wounded — you suffer now !” 

He looked at her with the smile whose sweetness had 
more tenderness than lies in any words. 

“If I do, I have no knowledge of it. A bruise ! — a 

hatchet-stroke ! Do you think I could remember those?” 

“ I do, at least. They were enough to stretch you as 
one dead but very lately ” 

“A passing faintness, nothing more. Believe me, a 
thousand wounds like these would never harm me. I have 
been half a soldier all my days.” 

“ So have I.” 

And as she' spoke she rent off some of the delicate 
white laces of her mask dress, and steeped them in the lit- 
tle spring that bubbled under the oak stems till they were 
cool and soft as lint, and tore asunder a broad strip of the 
scarlet silk of her Venetian domino and laid the wet laces 
on it. 

“Stoop down,” she said, softly, to him — a singular soft- 
ness, so gentle that in itself it was a caress had come upon 
her toward him. 


412 


IDA LI A. 


He stooped to her as she bade him, but his hands drew 
the broidered ribbons away. 

“ Not so. You shall not serve me.” 

“ Why not ? You have earned your right to service, if 
man ever earned it.” 

The breath of her lips was on his brow, her eyes looked 
into his with a love the deeper for the dew of unshed tears 
that glistened heavily in them, her hands touched him, 
making the pulses of his heart throb faster and the cur- 
rent of the blood glow in his veins, while, with a gentle- 
ness that in itself seemed to him balm enough to heal mor- 
tal wounds themselves, she wound the silken bands over the 
gash that the blunted axe had hacked, and the width of 
his chest that the rain of blows had covered with livid 
marks like the marks where a scourge has fallen. 

“Ah 1 God grant that these be the last and the least 
things you suffer through me.” 

The words escaped her almost unconsciously, while for 
the first time since her eyes had gazed in their set anguish 
on the dead men lying round her in the banqueting-hall of 
Antina, the tears gathered in them like the gathering 
drops of a storm, and fell one by one slowly on his hair 
and on his breast. She had made many endure danger 
and wretchedness, risk and despair, without pity; it was 
but fitting retribution that she had no power to ward them 
off from the only life for which she had ever cared. 

He held her hands close against his heart. 

“ I can never suffer now!” 

It seemed so to him. Keeping this, her love, he 
thought that no vicissitude or bitterness of life could have 
an hour’s power to move him ; that no fate could ap- 
proach him which had any shadow on it; that nothing 
men or fortune could deal unto him could ever move him 
to an instant’s pang. He did not dream that there are 
gifts, breathlessly, burningly coveted, which are more dis- 
astrous reached than lost. Like Faustus, he would have 
said to the future and its fate. 


“ Take 

My soul forever to inherit, 

To suffer punishment and pine, 
So this woman may be mine!” 


TIIE STORY OP THE PAST. 


413 


And his noble reckless chivalry of belief in her had alike 
the sublimity and the blindness which lie at the core of 
every chivalrous idealism ; blent, too, with something 
grander and something loftier still — a love that cleaved to 
her through all and in the teeth of all — a love that could 
find her human and darkened by human stains, yet never 
lose its worship, but reach high, even high as pardon, if 
need there were of any pardon’s tenderness. 

The day was waking ; the sun had risen ; even here, 
through the darkness of the oak boughs, the radiance was 
coming. He started to his feet, made as strong to save 
her now as though the force of a score of lives was poured 
into his own ; of pain, of weakness, of the aching fever 
that thrilled through his bruised limbs, he knew nothing. 
He seemed to have the strength of Titans, to have lost 
every sense of existence save those of its deep delight, it3 
wild joys, its dreamy ecstasy. 

“My love, my love, forgive me,” he murmured. “ In 
the heaven you have brought me I forgot your danger.” 

“Was it not best forgot ?” she asked, with that care- 
lessness and that sadness which mingled intricately in her 
nature. “ In a race for life and death, few would pause to 
speak as we have done ; but it is the surest wisdom to defy 
fate while we can.” 

“Fate ? There is no fate, save such as a strong hand 
carves, or a weak hand spoils, in Life.” 

“ Nay, am I not yours ?” 

She stooped to him with her old half-mocking sorcery, 
her loosened hair brushing his breast, her rich lips near 
his own, her eyes, deep with thought, humid with tears, 
yet luminous with that victorious challenge which was 
without pity, and which had so often defied men to have 
strength or power to deny her as their destiny. The old 
evil passed over her for a moment — the old evil of triumph 
in the unmerciful, unsparing knowledge that a human life 
was hers to do with as she would, as a crown of roses lies 
in a child’s wanton hands to be treasured or trodden down 
at will. 

He looked at her with a long wistful gaze, earnest as 
an unspoken prayer, and once more the darker and the 
more callous tyranny that had for one instant returned 
35 * 


414 


IDALIA. 


on her was softened and banished and driven back by the 
pure strength of an undivided loyalty, by the undivided 
trust of a brave man\s heart. 

“ You know it,” he answered her. “ Why play with me 
in speech when you hold my life in your power ?” 

The patience and gentleness of the rebuke touched her 
as had never done those florid vows, those ornate protesta- 
tions, such as she had heard so often until she was -as 
wearied by them as eyes that dwell long on the dazzling 
hues of jewels ache with their glitter and their profusion. 
Others had loved her as well as he, even with this depth, 
this might, this absolute submission of all existence to her, 
yet in him these had a dignity and a simplicity that 
claimed a reverence no other had done — these in him 
made her worthless of them in her own sight. 

“Ah, forgive me I” she said, with that contrition which 
in a woman thus proud, and of old thus unyielding as she 
was, had at once so much of poignancy, so much of self- 
reproach. “ 1 wish only it were otherwise ! I wish only 
that your fate were safely anchored in some pure and 
peaceful life mine could not touch. Why will men ever 
love where love is fatal ?” 

He looked at her with earnest thought, grave and infi- 
nitely tender. 

“ Fatal ? What is it that you fear for me ?” 

“All things.” 

“All ! That is to place but little trust in my strength 
to endure or to resist. What is it you dread most ?” 

“ Myself.” 

She gave him back his look, intent as his own, fathom- 
less, and filled with a pain that was half remorse, half pre- 
science. 

His face grew very pale. 

“ You mean — you will desert me ?” 

“No. Not that.” 

She spoke slowly, as if each word were a pang, then 
leaned toward him once more with the light of the risen 
day full on her face, and the splendor of her eyes troubled 
beyond grief. 

“ No. I never broke a trust ; and yours is the noblest 
ever placed in me. But — deaving to me — you will have 


THE STORY OF THE PAST. 


415 


bitter trials for your faith ; you will have, most likely, 
cruel suffering that I shall be powerless to spare you ; you 
will lose me, perhaps, by captivity, by shot, or by steel , 
you will pay for me, it may be, if ever I am yours, no less 
price yourself than death. Now do you not know why, 
though it rent my heart in twain, I would surrender you 
up, aud never look upon your face again, my love — my 
love ! — would you but take my warning ? v 

The first words had been almost cold from their enforced 
control ; with the last a yearning, aching desire trembled 
in her voice, which would have told him, had no other mo- 
ment told him, that what she felt for him was not pity nor 
gratitude, but passion itself. He heard in silence to the 
end, as one who has his own resolve set immutably, and 
listens to the utterance of counsel that has no more likeli- 
hood to make him swerve from it than the beating of the 
winds to move the rocks that they pass over. Not that he 
heard her lightly, or believed that undue fear made her 
count the peril for him with needless exaggeration ; he 
knew this was not in her nature, but he was wholly care- 
less of what price might be exacted from him for alle- 
giance to her, and he was as firm to cleave to it, whatever 
that price might be, as a soldier to cleave to his standard 
while there is sight enough left in his dying eyes to watch 
one gleam of the silken folds above his head that shall 
qever droop through him till men have killed, not con- 
quered, him. Then, holding her hands against his heart, 
he looked down on her with that graver and more chas- 
tened tenderness which, mingled with the vivid ardor of 
his love, born from the darkness of danger that was still 
around them, and from the defense that through it she, so 
brilliant, so fearless, and so negligent, had come to need 
from his strength and fr^w his fealty. In her intellect, in 
her ambitions, in her carelessness and magnificence of sov- 
ereignty, he was content that she should reign far beyond 
him, content to know that eke reached many realms which 
he had barely dreamed of • but in her necessity, in her 
peril, in her desolation, he \ 'ok up his title as a man to 
guard her, his right as a man to shield her, and to save 
her, if it should need be, even h*om herself. 

‘ We will speak no more of Hiat; our fates, whatever 


4 1 G 


IDALIA. 


they be, will be the same,” he answered her. “It may be 
that I shall suffer through you, as you say; if so, it will 
be without complaint, while I can still be dear to you. If 
death come — well ; it had little terror for us last night — it 
will have none for me, if it be only merciful enough to 
spare me life without you. A 3 for faith — oh God ! believe 
enough in me to know that no trial will exhaust it. If 
silence be bound on you, I will wait till you can break it 
with honor. I have no fear of what it guards from me. 
Love were of little worth that could' not yield so slight a 
thing as trust.” 

“A slight thing ? It is a greater gift than the gift of 
crowns or kingdoms — and far more rare.” 

She had heard him, moved deeply by the brave sim- 
plicity of the generous words ; her face was very pale, her 
head bowed ; in her own sight she was unworthy of this 
sublime unquestioning belief, and the knowledge entered 
like iron into her soul. 

“ Is it ?” he answered her. “ Then all love is a lie. 
However that be, take it as my gift to you, then; I have 
nothing else in the world to bring.” 

She looked at him with that long, grave, weary look of 
which he could not wholly read the meaniug. 

“You could bring me none I could prize more, or — 
could deserve less.” 

“ That cannot be. If you did not merit it, you would 
see no treasure in it. It is not those who value trust that 
betray it.” 

“ Betray it 1 No ; I never betrayed yet.” 

Her face wore for a moment the prouder and fearless 
look of royal courage and strength that had ever been most 
natural to it; then, swiftly, it changed, and a darkness fell 
over it — the darkness of remorse. 

“ That is not true,” she said, bitterly. “ Betrayal — in 
men’s sense of betrayal of comrade to comrade, of friend 
to friend, of honor to honor — never yet did touch me. But 
I betrayed as women always do — all those who loved me.” 

He watched her wistfully, but silently; his heart ached 
that there should be this shadow of unrevealed remorse 
between them ; his knowledge of her told him that Idalia 
was not a woman to let slight regrets weigh on her, or 


THE STORY OF THE PAST. 


41Y 


slight errors stir her conscience into pain ; he knew that 
among the wild-olive crown of her genius and her power 
some poisoned leaf of the belladonna must be wound, bril- 
liant but life-destroying. It was acute suffering to him ; 
she was to him as luminous, glorious, divine, and far above 
him as the sun itself; that across this sun of his life there 
should lie these black and marring shadows, gave him pain 
deep as his love. But loyalty was with him before all ; 
and beyond the reckless resolve of a blind passion, that 
would possess what it adored, though the possession should 
be accursed, there was the noble fealty he had sworn to 
her — the brave, patient, chivalrous trust which left un- 
asked whatever she wished untold, and was contented to 
believe and wait. 

He stooped to her, tenderly passing over her latest 
words. 

“Weary yourself no more with the past, ” he said, 
gently; a gentleness that was sweet to her, like the lulling 
murmur of calm waters after the blaze and riot of the vo- 
luptuous color of tropic forests. “ We have to think of the 
present and the future. Every moment is precious ; I have 
been too forgetful of your safety. You know better than 
I where your enemies lie, and how best they may be baf- 
fled. There is one who will not spare ” 

“ There are hundreds who will not. The land is as a 
net for me.” 

“ Then we must leave it ■” 

“ Is it so easy to leave such close-woven meshes ?” 

“ Easy, no. Possible, yes.” 

“And how ?” 

“That we will speak of later; for the present moment 
you must have food and rest. There will surely be some 
charcoal-burner’s or contadina’s hut here somewhere ; there 
is nothing hardly to fear from the peasantry in the forests 
or open country, and we must wait till nightfall for further 
flight. Stay an instant while I look around us ” 

“But you are not fit for any exertion! Your wound, 
your faintness ” 

He smiled on her; arid the light of the smile had a 
strange, sad beauty, that touched her with a pang, keen in 
pain and yet not without its sweetness. 

2 B 


418 


IDALIA. 


“ Those were nothing. Such as they were, you cured 
them. I think 1 have the strength of lions now.” 

He left her, and, going up where the earth rose precipi- 
tously, looked down the great dim aisles of forest that 
stretched away on every side, with the far unerring sight 
of a man who had known what it was to go through the 
heart of Persia with his life hanging on the sureness of his 
eye and aim, and who had ridden over the grass seas of 
Mexico and steered down the lonely windings of the Ama- 
zons, when with every moment a spear thrown from be- 
hind him, or an arrow launched from the dense screen of 
foliage, might end his years there and then forever. He 
stood motionless some instants, not a sign of bird, or beast, 
or vegetable life in the woodlands round escaping him ; he 
had learned all such forest lore of Indians and Gauchos, 
and he had a traveler’s swift sweep of vision, with a sol- 
dier’s rapid tactic and decision; the horses were grazing 
quietly near, too tired to stray, and watched, moreover, by 
Sulla, who had, unbidden, taken their guardianship. In a 
few moments longer he returned to her. 

11 There is some one living a score yards onward, or I am 
much mistaken ; wait here while I reconnoiter, and if you 
need me, fire ; I will be with you at the first echo of the 
shot.” 

He loaded the pistol that had fallen on the grass by her, 
and put it back into her hand, then thrust the boughs aside, 
and made his way to where, at some slight distance, the 
hut of some woodland dweller stood ; a faint low flicker 
of smoke, curling among the thickness of the leaves, had 
told him rightly there was some human habitation, and, 
though it was but a poor cabin, rudely built of loose stones 
and woven branches, it was more welcome to him than a 
palace would have been. He knew the Italian people as 
well as he knew the Border peasantry at home, and knew 
that they were gentle, kindly, and generous in the main. 
The hut stood in a very wilderness of beauty, wild vine, 
and the sweet fig beloved of Horace, gigantic pines, and 
the wood-strawberry that nestled in the grass, in their pro- 
fuse and vivid contrast making a paradise around it, while 
in its rear the high slope of pine-covered hills rose dark 
and massive, with falling waters tumbling down their steep 


THE STORY OP THE PAST. 


419 


incline into a broad still pool beneath, that was never 
stirred unless by the plunge of some diving water-bird. A 
young female child, with a rich Guido face and the step of 
a princess in her rags, was the only living thing found there; 
she answered him readily, balancing her water-jar as she 
came from the torrent like some Pompeian Naiad; her 
father had gone to his work at dawn ; he was a charcoal- 
burner, and he would not return till evening ; the stranger 
was welcome to shelter ; and food — well, there was no food 
except some millet- cakes, and a bit of dried fish from the 
fresh water ; he could have that, if he wanted. Any one 
near? Oh no, there was no one for ten miles or more 
round, except one or two huts like hers. She was a pic- 
turesque, handsome little forester, bare-legged and scarce 
clothed, yet with a wild freedom of movement, and a cer- 
tain pensive grace thoroughly national; very like the beau- 
tiful mournful models, Campagna-born, of Rome, who look 
like living poems, and who have but one thought — ba- 
j occlii. 

11 It is a miserable place for you, yet it will give us some 
sort of harbor,” he said, as he brought Idalia to the car- 
bonaro’s cabin. 

She looked across a moment at the luxuriance of vine 
and blossom, and backward at the black pine-mass, through 
which the falling waters glared like light, and smiled half 
wistfully as she looked. 

“ I think it is a paradise ! To forget the world amid 
such loveliness as this — what do you say? Would it be 
wise ? And yet — power is a dangerous thing; once hav- 
ing drunk of it, one has lost taste for every purer flavor. 
You do not know what that is ? You do not know what 
ambition is, then ? I can tell you; it is satiety with desire.” 

“ A bitter thing then ?” 

“ Yes. But not so bitter that it is not sweeter than all 
sweetness — only the sweetness so soon goes, and the dregs 
are so soon all we hold 1” 

He did not answer ; his heart ached that he was not 
able to bring dominion to this woman, who was so born 
for it ; that he had no diadem such as that of her foregone 
Byzantine sires to crown her with ; that he had nothing 
wherewith to achieve greatness — nothing wherewith to con- 


420 


ID ALIA. 


tent that desire, half disdainful yet undying, which was in 
her for the scepter and the sword, for all they ruled and 
all they gained. 

He left her in the inner chamber of the hut, that was 
roughly partitioned in two by a wall of stakes and woven 
rushes, and brought the horses under the shelter of a great 
cedar that shut out every ray of the sun ; he could use his 
left arm but little, owing to the shoulder-wound, but he 
loosened their girths, watered them, gave them a feed of 
rye from some corn that the cotters kept for bread, then 
bathed, and shook his barcarolo dress into the best order 
that it would assume, and thought what food in this wild 
waste he could find for her. That he was anhungered 
and athirst himself, that there was fever on him still from 
his injuries, and that, despite the plunge into the waters’ 
refreshing coldness, his bruised frame ached and his breath 
was hard to draw, he scarcely felt ; Idalia was his only 
memory. For her, he could have not alone the lion’s 
strength that he had said, but a woman’s gentleness, an 
Indian’s patience, an Arab’s keenness ; and nothing was 
too slight for him to heed, as nothing too great for him to 
brave, that could be offered in her service and her cause. 
That he had had no sleep, no rest, no food, weighed no- 
thing with him ; in the heat of the early day he sought 
with unwearying diligence for such things as he thought 
could tempt her. Wild strawberries on their own mosses ; 
beccaficos that haunted the place, and that he slew with a 
sling and baked in clay; dainty fish that he speared with 
the knife from his sash, wading waist-deep in the pool — 
these were all the woods would yield him. But love for 
her had made him an artist and a poet ; he served them in 
such graceful fashion, covering the rude table of the cabin 
with a cloth of greenest moss, and screening the coarse- 
hewn wooden trenchers with vine-leaves and flowers, that 
it was rather like such a forest banquet as Theocritus or 
Ben Jonson loved to cast in verse than like the meal in a 
wretched refuge of fugitives, for whom every moment 
might bring the worst terrors of captivity and death. 

When it was done — that travail of willing, tender ser- 
vice — he could have swept it down again with a stroke of 
his hand. 


TIIE STORY OF THE PAST. 


421 


“lama fool,” be thought, with a smile that had a sigh 
in it. “A child might thank me for those trifles; but 
she — wild strawberry-leaves for one who wants the laurels 
of fame, the gold foliage of a diadem I” 

Yet he stooped down again, and changed the garniture 
a little, so that the snow-white arums might lie nearer the 
scarlet of the fruit. He had a painter’s heart, and instinct 
told him that beauty in the lowliest things has ever a sweet 
psalm of consolation in it; he loved, and his love uncon- 
sciously told him that a coil of forest flowers is a better 
utterance of it than all the gold of Ophir. 

It was not wasted on her, this which he deemed so idle a 
trifle that she would not even note it. As her glance fell 
on the woodland treasures that the hands, which a few 
hours before had been clinched in a mortal gripe at her 
foe’s throat, had gathered to cover the poverty of their ref- 
uge, Idalia’s eyes filled with soft sudden tears — eyes that 
had so often looked down with cold, amused, careless scorn 
on those who wooed her with every courtly subtlety, with 
every potent magnificence of bribe. 

“ What depths of exhaustless tenderness there are in his 
heart 1” she thought. “ I might gaze there forever and 
find no base thing ! 0 God ! if he could say that of mine.” 

The day went on its way deepening to the full heat of 
noon, cloudless, sultry, lustrous, as such days of summer 
length in southern lands alone can be ; to him it was like 
one long unbroken dream, divine, voluptuous, intense as 
the radiance around them. They were safe here in the 
heart of the untrodden forest — safe, until with the fall of 
night their flight could be resumed. Within the darkness 
of the hut, the moss and foliage he had strewn everywhere 
made couches yielding as velvet, and filled the air with 
their fresh fragrance, with the gleam of the white flowers 
flashing in the gloom ; without stretched the vivid light 
and endless growth of the woodland, the glow of color, 
the foam of water, the play of sun-rays upon a thousand 
hills, and, above all, the deep blue of an Italian sky. Be- 
yond, under the great cedar, the horses browsed and rested, 
with broad shadows flung upon them cool and dark ; all 
the fantastic foliage ran riot like a forest of the tropics ; 
here and Vhere an oriole flashed like gold in the sun ; here 
36 


422 


IDALIA- 


and there the rich green of a lizard glanced among the 
grasses ; all else was still and motionless, steeped in the 
sensuous lull of southern heat. 

In such a day, in such a scene, danger and pain were 
forgot, as though they had no place on earth ; they were 
alone ; the young peasant-child went hillward after her 
single goat; there was not a sound or a sign of other life 
than theirs, and the oblivion of passion was upon them 
both ; they ceased to remember that they were fugitives — 
they only knew that they were together. 

They spoke very rarely; she let the past, with all its 
mystery and all its bitterness, drift away forgotten. To 
the future neither looked ; it might lead to the dungeon or 
the scaffold. They lived in the present hour alone, as 
those who love do ever live, in the first abandonment and 
usurpation of their passion. 

Once she looked down at him where he lay at her feet, 
and passed her hand among the richness of his hair. 

“ Does the earth hold another man capable of such sub- 
lime folly as yours? You give me your life ; yet never 
ask me once of mine?” 

“ What marvel in that? You have said, you wish si- 
lence on it.” 

“ Aud how many would heed such a wish ?” 

“ I know not how many would. But it is law to me.” 

“Ah 1 you are rash as Tannhauser. I told you so long 
ago.” 

“And I said then as now, Tannhauser was a cur. She 
was his; knowing that, what wanted he ? If he had had 
faith aright, and love enough, he would have wrested her 
out from the powers of darkness. lie would not have 
yielded her up — not even to herself. Evil is black in us 
all ; love, that is love in my reading, does not surrender 
us to it, or for it.” 

The deep glow of his eyes gazed into hers, speaking a 
thousandfold more than his words. He knew that the 
chains of some remorse bound her; to fear this for himself 
never dawned on the careless courage of that which she 
had well termed his “sublime folly,” but to free her from 
its dominion was a resolve with him not less resolute than 
had been his resolve to deliver her beauty from her captor^ 
fetters. 


THE STORY OF THE PAST. 


423 


Her face was softened to a marvelous richness, sadness, 
and pathos as he looked up at her — the gloom of the low- 
shelving roof above and behind them, the light of the day 
falling on her and about her, through the hanging leaves, 
from the burning sun without. 

“You like better the passion of the ‘ Gott und die Ba- 
jadere* poem? Well, so do I. It is nobler far. The god 
had faith in her, and, because he believed in her, saved her. 
Brave natures, defying scorn, may grow to merit scorn ; 
but no brave nature ever yet was steeled and false to trust.” 

“ And yours is brave to the death ; wherefore, till death, 
I trust it.” 

His words were low, and sweet, and earnest ; grave with 
that depth of meaning and of feeling which made reverence, 
not less than pity, move her toward the only man who had 
ever stirred her either to compassion or to veneration, and 
which gave grandeur, force, and nobility to the love which, 
without it, might have been but a madness of the heart and 
a desire of the senses. 

“ False women vow, as well as true — I vow you nothing,” 
she murmured to him; “but — I thank you beyond all 
words.” 

She did so thank him from her soul ; she to whom this 
faith was precious as no other thing could have been, since 
she knew at once that she had forfeited all title to claim, 
all likelihood to gain it, yet knew that very often calumny 
had wronged and envy stained her with many a charge of 
which she had been as guiltless as the white arums that lay 
unsullied at her feet. That strong, undoubting, imperish- 
able trust was the one jewel of life that she had of her own 
will renounced her title to, yet which she could value as 
no other, perhaps, who had not lost it, ever could have 
done so well. 

“Listen,” she said, stooping over him where he was 
stretched on the foliage at her feet, while her hand strayed 
still with a caress among his hair and over his lips. “So 
much of my life as I can tell yon I will — it is not a thou- 
sandth part, still it may make some things clearer to you. 
1 am of Greek birth, as you know ; and I doubt if there 
be in the world a descent that can claim greater names 
than mine. My race — nay, both races that were blent in 


421 


ID ALIA, 


me — stretched far back into the earliest Athenian time3 on 
one hand, and to the records of Byzantium on the other. I 
was the last to represent the pure Greek stock, and it was 
the one of which I was the prouder, though it had fallen 
into evil fortunes and much poverty. Of the Byzantine, 
there was but one besides myself, the brother of my dead 
mother, a strange man ; a rich, wayward, luxurious recluse ; 
a feudal prince, where he held his chieftainship in Rou- 
melia ; leading an existence more like an eastern story 
than aught else ; magnificent, voluptuous, barbaric, solitary, 
with all the glitter of Oriental pomp and all the loneliness 
of a mountain fief. A terrible tragedy that had occurred 
in his youth — I can tell it to you some other time — begot 
his love of solitude ; his passions and his tastes led him to 
make that solitude at once a palace and a prison, a harem 
and a fortress. I have little doubt that his life was evil 
enough ; but I did not know it, and he loved me with a 
lavish tenderness that left me fearless of him, though he 
had a great terror for all others. So the life I led 
from my birth to my sixteenth year was this : sometimes 1 
passed long months in Greece, in a great, desolate, poverty- 
stricken palace, with vast deserted gardens, in which I 
wandered looking at the bright iEgean, while dreaming of 
the dead glories of my people, with an Armenian monk, 
old, and stern, and learned, for my only guide, who taught 
me ail I would — more, perhaps, of abstruse lore, and 
strange scenes, and deep knowledge than was well for mo 
while so young. Ere I had seen the world I was steeped 
in it, from the telling of Roman cynics, and Athenian 
sages, and Persian magi, and Byzantine wits. I believed 
with all the credulous innocence of my own childhood, and 
I disbelieved with all the scornful skepticism of my dead 
masters. I had studied more deeply while I was yet a 
child than many men do in their whole lifetime. From 
that lonely meditative life in Greece I was often changed, 
as by magic, to the unbridled luxury and indulgence of the 
Roumelian castle. Slaves forestalled my every wish; splen- 
dor, the most enervating that could be dreamt of, sur- 
rounded me within, while the grandest natural beauty was 
everywhere without; if vice there were, I never saw it, 
but the most gorgeous pleasures amused me, and my bid* 


THE STORY OF TIIE PAST. 


42 & 


ding was done like the commands of an empress, for I was 
the adopted heir of the great Julian, Count Yassalis. 
Now can you not imagine how two such phases of life, 
alternating in their broadest and most dangerous contrasts 
from my earliest memory upward, made me fatal indeed to 
others, but to none so fatal as to myself?” 

She laid her hands on his lips to arrest the words he 
would have spoken, and passed on in her narrative. 

“ No. No denial. God grant I be not fatal at the last 
to you. Well, it was these two dissimilar lives that made 
me what I am. I was happy then in both ; happy, dream- 
ing in poverty in Greece ; happy, dreaming in magnificence 
in Roumelia; ambitious already, ambitious as any Caesar 
in both. In Athens I had the poetry and the purity of 
gloryin me ; in Turkey its power and its pomp allured mo. 
Both, combined with the knowledge of my past heritage in 
Hellenic fame, and of my future heritage in the Yassalis 
dominion, gave me the pride of an emperor and the vision 
of an empire wide as the world. Ah Heaven ! yet the 
dreams were pure, too — purer and loftier than anything 
that life can realize. For I did not dream for myself alone. 
I dreamed of peoples liberated, of dynasties bound together 
by love of the common good, of the Free Republics re- 
vived by my hand, and shedding light in all dark places 
where creeds reigned affd superstitions crouched, of misery 
banished, of age revered, of every slavery of custom broken, 
of every nobler instinct followed, of men made brethren and 
not beasts of prey, who hunt down and devour the young, 
the weak, the guiltless. Ah Heaven 1 what dreams they 
were.” 

Her head sank, her eyes were fixed on the flood of light 
without, her thoughts were far from him, far beyond him, 
in that moment, as the thoughts of genius ever are far from 
those who love the thinker best, and arc best loved in an- 
swer. 

They were with the dreams of her youth ; such dreams 
as lighted the youth of Yergniaud and found their fruition 
on the scaffold. 

* Well, with you they never perished ?” 

*• No, not utterly. But they were tainted, how deeply 
tainted I Well, thus I lived, a fairy story and a pageantry 
36 * 


426 


ID ALIA. 


filling one-half my years, monastic seclusion and heroic 
memories holding the rest. As I grew older, Julian Vas- 
salis often spoke with me of many things ; he was a bold, 
magnificent, kingly, reckless man, a chief who answered to 
none, a voluptuary who laughed at the world he had 
quitted, a genius who might have ruled widely and wisely 
with a Sulla’s iron hand, a Sulla’s careless laughter. He 
found me like him, and he made me yet more like. It 
might be — but it is not for my lips to blame him — he loved 
me well in life, and strove, so far as prescience could, to 
guard me when his life ended. That was in my sixteenth 
year. He bequeathed me all his vast properties, with the 
fief in Roumelia and other estates, requiring only that I 
took his name, and, wherever I wedded, never changed it. 
It is through him that I became one of the richest women 
in Europe ; much is gone, but great wealth still remains 
with me. Can you not fancy what I was eight years ago, 
with the world before me, untried, unknown, with passion 
untouched, with ambition still but in its sweet vague ideals, 
with innocence as soilless as those lilies, and courage fear- 
less as the courage of the young eagles ? Can you marvel 
that I believed I should have the sovereignty of Semiramis? 
Can you not understand how easily I credited those who 
for their own ends deluded me to the belief?” 

Her face darkened as she spoke, and her voice sank with 
a thrill of hate in it. He caught it, and his own voice took 
her tone. 

“ Tell me who they were. If they be living ” 

The menace recalled her from the past to the present. 

“ No. That is one of many things I cannot tell you yet, 
if ever. From no love of mystery — I abhor it — but from 
a brutal inexorable necessity, as little to be escaped from 
as the destiny of the ancients. We know that there is no 
such thing as destiny, but we make as hard a task- master 
for ourselves out of our own deeds. Of my childhood I 
can speak freely, but from Julian Yassalis’s death dates 
the time that I must in so much leave a blank to you. 
Those were with me who knew how to touch every chord 
in my nature, and they used their power ably. I was am- 
bitious ; they tempted my ambition. I loved sovereignty ; 
they pointed to such realms as might have dazzled wiser 


THE STOEY OF THE PAST. 


42T 


heads than mine when I first stood on that giddy eminence 
of command, and riches, and splendor, and was told that 
I had the beauty of a Helen, while I knew that I had the 
courage of men, and felt even stir in me men’s genius and 
men’s fores. Do not deem me vain that I say this. God 
knows all vanity is dead in me, if I ever had it, and I 
think that I was at all times too proud to be guilty of 
that foible. And it was by higher things than such frailty 
that they lured me. I loved freedom; I loved the peoples; 
1 rebelled against the despotism of mediocrities, the nar- 
row bonds of priesthoods ; I had the old liberties of Greece 
in my veins, and I had the passionate longing for an im- 
mortal fame that all youth, which has any ideal desires at 
all, longs for with the longing * of the moth for the star.’ 
Well, through these, by these, I fell into the snares of those 
who draped their own selfish greeds and intrigues in the 
colors of the freedom that I adored ; who knew how to 
tempt me with the pure laurels of a libera&r, while in truth 
they bound me with the fetters of a slave . ” 

He did not speak, but looked at her, with his lips breath- 
less, with his eyes passionate as fire, through the mist that 
dimmed them as he heard. Hearing no more than this, 
her life seemed known in its every hour to him ; he under- 
stood her more nearly, more deeply, than any man had ever 
done ; more truly far than those whose genrus and whose 
aspirations had far more closely been akin with hers. 

She looked at him and sighed. 

“ Wait. Do not think me blameless because in the out- 
set I was wronged. I tell you that I have great sins at 
my score. True, at the time I speak of now, I was sinned 
against, not sinning. I was led to ally myself in earliest 
youth with those whom later years have shown me were 
desperate, insatiate, unscrupulous, guilt-stained gamesters, 
who staked a nation’s peace to win a gambler’s throw, and 
played at patriotism as keenly and as greedily as men play 
for gold. I was dazzled, intoxicated, beguiled, misled at 
once by all that was best and all that was worst in me ; and, 
too late, I found the truth, found every avenue of retreat 
closed, found myself bound beyoud escape, found that ” 

She paused abruptly, shutting in the words, but the hand 
that lay in his contracted as though it grasped a weapon 
wherewith to requite a deadly, endless wrong. 


428 


ID ALIA. 


“ So far I was sinned against,” she went on, with ef 
fort, as though the memories which arose stifled her with 
poisonous fumes. “But in all else the evil is mine. The 
sway was guilty that had been put into my hands, but 1 
grew to love it as we grow to love the opium that we hate 
at first. All power had irresistible fascination for me, and 
I learned to use mine pitilessly; and I should use it so to- 
morrow to all save you. The political career into which 
I had been plunged had its sorcery for me ; I delighted in 
it even while I abhorred it. I soon learnt how to play on 
men’s passions until from them I gained what I would. I? 
my instruments were broken under my hands, I never heeded 
it; they had served my end, and the end was great 
still, though its means were accursed ; the end was still the 
liberties of the nations. The truth did not come to me 
till I had gone too far to draw back, too far not to be 
enamored of th^ merciless dominion that I found I could 
command. When I knew it, I grew wholly reckless. I 
had been foully, basely wronged, and all that was dangerous 
in me rose and hardened. I had been stabbed in the dark 
by hands that were sworn to shield me. I cared little what 
I did, nothing for what was said of me, after that. I am 
not justifying myself ; I merely show you what fires they 
were which burned me heartless. I have been associated 
with every movement of the advanced parties of Europe 
through the years that have gone by since I first became 
the Countess Vassalis; I have been the inspirer of more 
efforts, the guide of more intrigues, than I could tell you 
in a score of hours, even were I free to tell you them ; I 
have held in my time, indirectly, more power than many a 
minister whose name is among the rulers ; the world does 
not know how it is governed, and it does not dream how 
kings have dreaded and statesmen sought to bribe me. 
One thing alone I remained true to, heart and soul — my 
cause. For the freedom of the peoples, for the breaking 
of their chains, I have labored with all such strength and 
brain and force as nature gave me. In that I have been 
true, and without taint of selfish desires. God knows that 
to raise my own land among the nations, and to gain Italy 
for the Italians, and to do — were it ever so little — to crush 
the tyrannies of creeds, to bring nearer the daylight of 


THE STORY OF THE PAST. 


429 


fearless and unfettered truth, I would let Giulio Yillaflor 
and his creatures kill me as they would. In that I have 
been loyal to the core, but in all else I have been very 
guilty. I have tempted, blinded, seduced men into the 
love that gave them as wax into my hands. I have roused 
their darkest passions, that of those passions I might make 
the firebrands or the swords my purpose needed. I have 
taken their peace and crushed it to powder ; I have taken 
their hearts and broken them without a pause of pity ; I 
have sent them out to the slaughter careless how they fell, 
so that my will was done ; I have sent them out to perish, 
far and wide, north and south, east aud west, and never 
asked the cost of all that gold of human life wherewith I 
played my pitiless gambling. I smiled at those for whom 
I cared no more than for the stones of that torrent ; I let 
them hope I loved them, so long as that hope was needed 
to make them ready instruments to my using ; I was stirred 
no more by despair than I was for compassion. So long 
as I had my slaves, I heeded nothing what they suffered, 
how they were captured. I only smiled at the fools who 
thought women had no share in the making of history, no 
power to penetrate the arcana of life ! That was all.” 

He listened, and a heavy sigh answered her as she 
paused; it was involuntary, unconscious. He had believed 
imldalia, as with a woman’s absolute unquestioning belief; 
it struck him hardly, deeply, to know by her own telling 
that she had these ruined broken lives, these Circean cruel- 
ties in her past ; that the witching splendor of her sorcery 
had been thus steeped in tears of blood, thus bartered for 
the gain of triumph and dominion. No fear for himself 
even now crossed him ; his courage was too bold, his pas- 
sion too ardent. It was the knowledge that she should 
thus have stained the beauty and the genius of her life 
which came on him, not unlooked for, since he had ere this 
known that there were error and remorse upon her; yet 
bitcer as the fall of what is treasured and is reverenced 
must ever be, however love remain faithful and unshaken 
to that fall’s lowest depth. 

“ One question only,” he said to her, while his voice was 
low and tremulous. “ Through this, was there never one 
whom you loved ?” 


430 


ID ALIA. 


She met his gaze fully, thoughtfully, truly he could have 
sworn, or never eyes spoke truth. 

“ Not one 1” 

“ Is it possible ?” 

She smiled a little, with her old weary irony. 

“Very possible. Poets have written much about the 
love of women; I do not think it a tithe so warm and 
strong as the love of men. Many women are cold sensual- 
ists, many are inordinately vain ; sensualism and vanity 
make up nine-tenths of my sex’s passions, though senti- 
mentality has so long refused to think so.” 

“But you must have been surrounded by so many — by 
all that was most brilliant and most seductive ?” 

“ Yes ; yet a tinsel brilliancy, for the most part. Be- 
sides, I did not come into the world ignorant of it, as most 
youth comes. Julian Yassalis, and my own tastes, and 
others who influenced me then, had given me the surest 
shield against the follies of love in studies deeper far than 
most women, if they had driven away my faith in life too 
early, with the sneers of Persius, with the scourge of Ju- 
venal, with their own cynic wit and their own manifold 
knowledge. Ambition was infinitely more the passion to 
tempt me than love ever was. I luxuriated in the sense of 
my own power, in the exercise of my own fatal gifts ; but 
I scorned from the bottom of my heart the men who were 
fooled by such idle things as a girl’s glance, as a woman’s 
smile. If the gold gleam of my hair ensnared them, I 
could not but disdain what was so easily bound ; if they 
were spaniels at my word, I knew they had been, or they 
would be, as weakly slaves of any other who succeeded me, 
and as easily subjugated by a courtesan as they were by 
me, when I chose to use the power. I thought very scorn- 
fully of love. I saw its baser side, and I held it a madness 
of men by which women could revenge a thousandfold the 
penalties of sex that shut us out from public share in the 
world’s government. A statesman is great, a woman can 
make him a wittol ; a chief is mighty, a woman can make 
him a byword of shame and reproach ; a soldier has honor 
firm as steel, a woman can make him break it like a stalk 
of green flax; a poet has genius to gain him immortality, 
a woman can make him curse the world and its fame for 


THE STORY OF THE PAST. 


431 


her sake, and die like a dog, raving mad for the loss of 
scarlet lips that were false, of eyes divine that were lies. 
No power! We have the widest of all! Well, I but 
knew that better than most, and used it yet more unmer- 
cifully than most. And I think what gave that power 
tenfold into my hands was that one fact — that the weak- 
ness of love never for one instant touched me myself, that 
the temptations of love never tempted me for an instant, 
that my intellect alone dealt with them, and my heart re- 
mained ever cold.” 

“And — God ! — it has wakened for me ? How is it pos- 
sible ? What have I that those had not ? I have nothing 
on earth whereby to be worthy of you — whereby to have 
won you ?” 

His life was so sweet with its rapture, his passion was 
so blind with its victory, he scarce remembered those who 
had so vainly suffered before him. Every happiness is 
selfish, more or less ; and his was so in that moment. She 
half smiled, and let her head droop over him, till her lips 
touched his again : 

“ Who can answer for love ? Others have done as much 
for me as you — others have loved me, even as well as you ; 
but ” 

“None had yours in answer?” 

He asked it eagerly, breathlessly, still; this was all that 
he doubted in her past — that some other life had reigned 
before him in that heart which beat so near to his. 

“ No ! A thousand times no, if you care for the denial. 
Love was my tool, he was never my master.” 

She spoke with her old imperial dignity of disdain for 
those follies of feeling and of the senses which sway man- 
kind so widely and so idly. Then the scorn faded from 
her eyes, a weariness stole there instead ; her voice sank, 
and lost its pride in the contrition of self-accusing memo- 
ries, of heart-sick confession. 

“ But do not honor me for that. It made my crime, I 
think, the deeper. Those senseless women, whom I have 
so often contemned, with all the contempt that was in me, 
for their maudlin romances, their emotional sentiment, which 
make them see a god in every commonplace mortal, and 
give them idols as many as the roses in summer, are, after 


432 


IT)AIJa. 


all, perhaps, truer and better — fools though they be — than 
I. Their emotions, at least, are real, however fleeting, 
vain, and shallow. But I — leave me when you know it, if 
you will, but know it you shall — never felt one faintest 
touch of tenderness for any one of those who loved me, yet 
I was merciless enough, sinful enough, shameful enough, if 
you will, never to let one among them know that, until he 
was deep enough in my toils to have no power to loose 
himself from them. I let them hope, I let them believe, I 
let them think their reward sure, until such time as they 
were mine — courage and honor and body and soul all mine 
— to use as I would, for the ends and in the cause of my 
ambitions. I let them think I loved them, and then I used 
their minds or their hands, their names or their strength, 
whichever I needed to tak$; and I never asked once, I 
never once pitied, when I knew that their hearts were 
broken. Go — you must think me guilty enough now. Go 
— for if your trust be dead, rend me out of your life once 
and forever at a blow, rather than pass your years with 
what you doubt.” 

She put him from her as she spoke, and rose; her face 
was very pale, grave with a profound sadness, with a set 
resolution ; the words cost her more than it would have 
cost her to have thrust the Venetian dagger into her bosom 
to escape the pursuit of Giulio Viliaflor, but they were 
spoken without a pause to spare herself ; she loved him 
better than herself, and she knew that unless this man’s 
faith were perfect in her, the lives of both would be a hell. 
And Idalia was too proud a woman to allow such faith to 
be given in error and in ignorance, unmerited. 

His breath was sharply drawn, as under a keen physical 
pain; he stood and looked at her, with a look that was 
revenge enough for all the unpitying cruelties of her past; 
it was so unconsciously a rebuke, so silently and terribly in 
its pain a condemnation passing words. 

For the first time under his gaze her proud head drooped, 
her eyes filled with tears of shame, the paleness of her face 
flushed ; before the noble truth of his every act and word, 
the bold simplicity of his creeds of honor, her own life 
looked to her very guilty, very far from the fair light of 
justice and of loyalty. 


THE STORY OF THE PAST- 


435 


“ Leave me,’ 1 she said to him, briefly, though her voice 
was very low. ‘ But — do not you reproach me.” 

In answer his arms were stretched to her, and drew her 
to his breast ; in that moment he had command over her, 
in that moment he was not her slave, but her judge. His 
face was grave and-almost stern, for he suffered keenly, but 
his voice and his touch were infinitely gentle. 

“ Leave you ? You think I know so little how to value 
a woman who has the noblest virtue on earth — truth ?” 

“ Truth ! when I have told you my whole life was, in 
one sense, a lie?” 

“ Truth — because you have so told me. Oh, my be- 
loved ! know me better than this. Can I not condemn 
your errors, and yet cherish you but the more because you 
need some pity and some pardon ?” 

She lay silent in his arms, deeper smitten than by any 
rebuke or execration by the unutterable tenderness of this 
love that was too true to truth to hold her guiltless, and 
too true to itself to forsake her because it condemned her. 
In that moment, she knew how much greatness there was 
in this man's nature, how much dignity in his passiou. 

“But your trust, your faith?” she said at last, as she 
looked up at him. 

“Will be with you ever, as my love will be.” 

He stooped and leant his cheek on hers, while low in 
her ear a few words stole ; he could not keep them back 
from the aching and the longing of his heart. 

“ Tell me but one thing. You say you wore the mask 
of passion to fool them ; — did you ever let another before 
me tell you of his passion thus ?” 

His own lips lingered in their kisses upon hers ; she 
drew herself from his embrace with something of her old 
smile, of her old scorn. 

“No. Or no prayer of yours should make me your 
wife.” 

“And then you ask me if my faith be perfect still ! There 
are scores of women — women who would censure you — 
who think it no shame to bring tainted lips to their hus- 
bands.” 

“Well,” she said, wearily, “give me not too much praise 
for being prouder, and it may be colder than many women 

3t 


2 C 


434 


ID ALIA. 


are ! If 1 never bent to the follies of love, I was but the 
more blamable, perhaps, for using them without mercy to 
my own ends. I tell you I neve r spared. If any ever 
doubted or resisted me, he had a terrible chastisement; 
he soon gave his very soul and conscience up into my 
hands. Sometimes I think that Mcphistopheles himself 
never tempted more deffiy and more brutally than I have 
done. That dead Viana ! lie would be living now were 
it not for me. He was half a Bourbon in his creeds ; he 
worshiped pleasure, and pleasure alone; revolutions might 
have reeled around him, and Carlo would never have laid 
down the wine-cup, never asked with what side the day 
went or the battle turned. But I brought him to give his 
very life to my moulding; I moved him to his own ruin by 
those very qualities of fearless chivalry and generous pas- 
sion that should have been his shield from me. And — oh 
God ! — if you had seen him lying dead there as I saw him, 
with his brave face turned upward, that he might smile in 
my eyes to the last ! ” 

Her head sank, there was the set mute anguish on her 
of a remorse that would never fade out while life remained. 
He stood beside her silent also ; he knew that there were 
no words that could assuage this bitterness, he knew that 
to this self-condemnation justice forbade any consolation 
that must have been at its best but a deceiving sophistry. 

“Yet you say your cause was noble V 7 he asked her, 
gently, at the last. “It was not to gain the cruel empty 
triumph of a woman’s vanity that you beguiled them V } 

“ God knows ! There was guilty triumph enough in me 
at times. In the main — yes — it was for the cause of free- 
dom that I won them. That had been harmless ; but my 
sin was that I made them stake their lives on me, yield 
their souls to me, surrender their consciences to me — be- 
cause I taught them love, and then, when they were my 
slaves, I used them to their own destruction, as these char- 
coal-makers thrust the fresh wood in to burn and feed their 
fires. ” 

“ Still you be lieved that those fires were the sacrifice- 
fires of the peof ie’s altars of liberty V 7 

She shivered slightly in the ardent heat of the broad 
noonday. 


THE STORY OF THE PAST. 


435 


“At first, with all the youth and passion of faith that 
were in me, I did believe it. And I clung to the belief 
long — long after I knew it had its root in quicksands. But 
after I had learned how hopeless the struggle for pure free- 
dom is, after I had learned that the absolutisms of thrones 
and churches are masked batteries of iron and granite on 
to which the thinker and the poet and the patriot fling 
themselves in combat only to be crushed and perish ; after 
I had learned that only one among ten thousand of those 
who had the welfare of the peoples on their lips had it also 
in their hearts, and that fraud, knavery, selfish greed, im- 
patient discontent, corrupt ambitions, were the natures of 
the liberators not less than of the tyrants ; — after I had 
read the bare truth to its last letter ; — I lured them still. 
Partly because I was irrevocably bound to the work, partly 
because all my old belief would not die ; chiefly of all, be- 
cause I bad grown to love the power possessed, and could 
not bring myself to lay it down and own my whole life a 
defeat. Nor was it one ” 

The warmth flushed her face again, her eyes lit with the 
light of victory, something of the haughty defiance with 
which she had challenged Giulio Viilaflor returned then as 
she challenged the memories of her past. 

“ It has been a crime, it may be — but not a failure. No 
Yassalis ever failed. I have fed hope into action, when 
without me it would have died out in darkness. I have 
armed hands that but for my weapons could never have 
struck their oppressors down. I have breathed liberty 
into a thousand lives that but for me might never have 
drawn in its mountain air. I have loosened the bonds of 
many martyrs ; I have broken the chains of many captives 
— men who suffered agonies, here in this Italy, simply be- 
cause they dared to cling to her, and seek vengeance for 
her violation. No. It has been no failure. Are we not 
victorious at the last, if the least thing for freedom have 
been wrought by us ?” 

She spoke not to him but to her Past, as though its re- 
morse arraigned while yet its conquest crowned her. She 
pleaded with her own conscience ; she raised her cause in 
justification against the witness of the years that were 
gone; she had been true — true to the death — to the 


436 


IDALIA. 


peoples of the earth and to their liberties, true to Truth 
through all. 

It is a noble loyalty, one very rare amid mankind — ono 
that surely may avail to atone for much. 


CHAPTER XXVIII. 

'* BY MORNING TOUCHED WITH AUREOLE LIGHT; BY SUN- 
SET STRANDED. ” 

Those words were the last on her lips for many mo- 
ments. From the gloom and stillness of the hut, where 
the r e was a depth of shadow only broken by the green 
mosses that strewed the floor and the gray flash of a tame 
pigeon’s wing guarding its brood in the farthest nook, she 
looked out at the luxuriance of color and the blaze of sun, 
while her thoughts were sunk into the past. 

He did not break her musings ; his own thoughts were 
filled with her history, of which he still knew, in truth, but 
so little, yet which seemed to him told wholly in those few 
brief sentences. Memories also came to him, revived by 
her relation — memories vague and fugitive, as of things 
scarcely heard before, because without interest at the time 
of their hearing, of stories that had floated to him in clubs 
and cafes in the cities of Europe, long ere he had met 
Idalia, of some beautiful Greek or Roumelian, of whom 
men told marvels, and about whose reputation had gath- 
ered many splendid idle romances, fabulous as they were 
contradictory — romances that gave a thousand magnificent 
impossible legends to the records of her life, but stole from 
her, as such romances ever will, all “ the white flower of a 
blameless life,” and made her pleasures as guilty, and her 
charms as resistless, as those of Luerezia or Theodora. 
He had never heeded them in their telling ; he had eared 
little for women, still less for the babble of slanders, and 
they had passed him without interest enough to linger on 


AT SUNSET STRANDED. 


437 


his remembrance an hour But now, with the words of 
her story, they recurred to him as such forgotten things 
will. Not to sting him with doubts of her, with fear for 
himself — suspicion of her was a thing impossible to him — . 
but to madden him with impatient longing to reach her 
calumniators and strike them down. His nature was too 
bold for slander to do more than rouse his passion against 
the slanderer, his chivalry for the slandered. 

“ They were all lies 1” he muttered in his beard, his face 
flushing as those distant memories stole on him. “All 
lies 1 — where are the tellers of them ?” 

She started slightly, and her eyes came back from their 
dreaming speculation and dwelt on his. 

“What were the lies ?” 

“Things that I heard of you — once. I remember 
now ” 

“Ah I” A quick sigh escaped her — she would so gladly 
have kept her life fair and unshadowed in this man’s sight 
at least. “Well, do not blame the tellers of them; my 
life laid me open to misconstruction ; no one can com- 
plain, if their lives do so, of any calumny that may befall 
them.” 

Her voice was cold and careless ; the evil of calumny 
had not power to wound, but it had had power to chill 
and harden her, and the venom had left its trail thus for- 
ever. 

“But why ” 

He paused, not willing even by a syllable to risk trench- 
ing on that silence which she thought it fittest to keep un- 
broken. 

“ Why did I so leave it open ? For many things. 
First, ere I knew what calumny meant — when I was so 
young to the world that I yet believed I and Truth could 
avail to convince and to conquer it ! — my name was 
stained too deeply, all undreamt of by me, for any future 
career, had it been pure as a child’s, to wash the stain 
away. I was slandered — unjustly. Slandered, I say! It 
was a thousand times worse than that. A traitor took 
the blank page of my youth and wrote it over behind n 7 
back with infamous, indelible falsehood ” 

A heavy curse broke asunder her words. 

37 * 


438 


ID ALIA. 


“ Tell me who he was, and vengeance shall find him.” 

She passed her hand over his brow with a gentle caress. 

“ No. You shall have no darkness on you from my 
past of my bringing. But you do not fear to take to your 
heart a woman whom the world has called evil thus ?” 

“ The world ! What terrors do you think that liar has 
for me ?” 

She smiled — a smile in which there was as much of wea- 
riness as of sweetness. 

“ It is not always a liar ; it was not so always in what 
it said of me. But we will leave that ! To-day is our 
own ; we will not poison it. You think we may make our 
way to the sea to-night ?” 

'‘I do. There is little to be feared in the open country 
— almost nothing from the peasantry. The horses will be 
fresh, and if we can reach the little fishing village nearest to 
Antina, I could send some barcarolo to bring in my yacht. 
No suspicion falls on the vessel ; the soldiers I saw at 
your villa did not know me, and no one will hear anything 
from Nicolo. We have only to fear the sbirri ” 

“Wait; tell me all. How was it you heard of my ar- 
rest ? How was it you found me ?” 

He told her ; and she listened in the soft lull of the 
noon silence, in the leafy twilight of the forest hut, to the 
story of his search for her — listened with an exceeding ten- 
derness on the face, whose careless pride so often had 
smiled contemptuously on all love and all despair. He told 
it in very few words, lessening as much as was possible all 
pain he had endured, all difficulty he had conquered, lest 
he should seem to press a debt upon her in the recital. 
But the very brevity, the very generosity, touched her as 
no eloquence would have done. By the very omissions 
she knew how stanch had been this endurance, how de- 
voted this fidelity, which through good and evil report had 
cleaved to her, and fought their way to her. 

“ My love, my love,” she murmured, as she stooped to 
him, staying his last words. “ Oh, that I might repay 
you in the future. If I were only sure that I should bring 
you no misery — if I could only know that no evil from me 
would fall on you — if I could only feel there were nothing 
untold between us, and that my life were worthier of your 


AT SUNSET STRANDED. 


439 


noble loyalty — I would lose every coin and rood of my in- 
heritance, and come to you beggared of everything, yet 
rich, my God ! how richer far than now.” 

He had never seen her dignity so utterly abased, her 
pride so utterly swept away as now, when those broken 
and longing utterances escaped her ; he saw that memo- 
ries, which were in that moment an agony, shook down all 
the strength and all the calmness of her nature. 

“ Listen,” he said, softly and gravely, while he drew her 
hands in his. “ Beggared or crowned, you would alike be 
my mistress, my empress, my idol. Slandered or honored, 
you will alike be the one glory of my life, the one thought 
in my death. Why let us speak as if we should ever part ? 
You must slay me, or forsake me, ere ever we shall be di- 
vided now.” 

Her mouth quivered, her eyes filled, as she heard him ; 
slowly, and in silence, she stooped and let her lips rest on 
his. 

For some moments she answered him in no other way 
than by that one touch of her caress ; then, with one of 
the swift transitions of her changeful temperament, she 
looked down on him with a smile in which all her most se- 
ductive sweetness gleamed, as the gold rays of the southern 
day flashed in the dark lustrous languor of her regard. 

“Anima mia ,” she murmured, caressingly, “ we will be- 
lieve so, at least while we can, even — even if you should 
live to curse me, and I should live for Monsignore Villa- 
floras vengeance 1 Let us dream of a Future, then. I 
have so long thought of the world’s future only, and so 
long not dared to give a glance at my own ! Let us dream 
while we can. Tell me of your old Border castle ? We 
will raise it from its ashes once more if you will. And you 
shall come and be lord of my great Boumeiian fief, all its 
hills, and its plains, and its rivers, and its vast solitudes 
with their terrible beauty, and its fortress that is a palace, 
like some Persian vision of the night that we see when we 
have fallen asleep in reading Firdursi. Ah ! there is a 
life there possible, if we could but reach it — a life fit for 
your bold chieftainship, a life that might redeem my past. 
We both know the world to weariness. There, eastward, 
you and I — we might find something at least of the old 


IDALTA. 


*iC 

ideals of my early fancies; there are a people sunk in sloth 
and barbarism, there are the domains of a prince, there are 
grand woods and waters, and mountains to be piled between 
us and the world, there is human soil barren of every good 
thing, uncultured, useless, needing the commonest tillage. 
I should be free there, and you would be a king in your 
own right. It needs just such a sovereign as you would 
be, my brave, dauntless, lion-hearted wanderer ! We 
might be happy? We might reach still more yet than 
merely happiness ?” 

And they dreamed of the Future, while the brilliant day 
stole onward, and the stillness of intense heat brooded over 
the sun-lighted earth ; the Future that to him was a treas- 
ury of joys so passionate, so measureless, so incredible 
that they seemed passing all hope, escaping all reach ; the 
Future that to her was in its fairest vision but as a mirage 
of that lost land of peace and liberty which her own act 
had forfeited forever. 

The day declined from its noon height, and neither knew 
nor asked how the hours were numbered. 

When the sun was touching the lowest cloud, and the 
amber glow was burning into scarlet, he started to his feet ; 
he remembered that the forester would be coming home- 
ward, and that with evening their flight must begin. As 
they left the cabin, Idalia looked round it with a long and 
wistful glance; the day would be dear in her memory be- 
yond all others, and in her own heart she believed that it 
was the last they should ever pass together. Then she 
lifted one of the rude wooden bowls to him with her old 
half-tender, half-coquette smile. 

“ The child is not here ; put some coins in for us both. 
You must give me your gold to-day; if ever we are free, 
you shall be lord of all I own. Ah ! you only care to be 
lord of myself? Do you think that I do not know that? 
But I shall care to crown you and give you such purples 
as I have. You are royal to the very core of your fearless, 
kingly heart ; and you shall reign over my kingdom, such 
as it is, if ever we can reach it.” 

They went out into the stillness of the forest, so still that 
they might have been alone in an unpeopled world. Here 
and there through the network of branches the flushed sky 


AT SUNSET STRANDED. 


44 \ 

glowed, vivid as fire ; darkness already bad fallen on the 
slopes of the hills, behind which the sun had sunk down; 
on the foam of the waters opposite gleams and breadths of 
prismatic color still sparkled ; the evening air was heavy 
vith fragrance, and under the foliage the luciole began to 
glimmer. Erceldoune went toward the grazing horses, 
tethered in camp-fashion by a long heel-rope, beneath the 
cedars; she followed him, stroking the neck of the brave 
sorrel that had borne her with such unflagging speed 
through the whole of the past night. 

“ Carry me as bravely again, caro ,” she murmured him, 
drawing the silken mane through her hand. “Take me 
to freedom, and you shall have such pathless meadows of 
wild grass to wander in, eastward, at your will ! — no curb 
shall ever touch you, no spur shall ever gall you !” 

As she caressed the hunter, the hound at her side dropped 
his muzzle earthward with a low smothered growl, then 
lifted his head, and looked at her with anxious, eager ques- 
tions in his imploring eyes. 

“ The dog scents some danger. What is it, Sulla V y 
she asked, giving him that sign of silence which the animal 
had learned so well. 

“A wolf, may be. We will unearth him if he be any- 
thing worse,” said Erceldoune, as he swept back with one 
arm the heavy boughs, while with his right hand he loosened 
the pistol from his sash. The rocks sloped sharply down ; 
the sunset light shone on the dell beneath as he leant for- 
ward. 

A cry broke from him, loud, wild, exultant as the cry of 
the eagle swooping to its prey. With one hand still hold- 
ing upward the matted veil of foliage, he stood rooted 
there, all the worst passions of his nature roused in an 
instant into deadliest strength. 

There, almost at his feet, far beneath in the curved hol- 
low of a moss-grown, cup-shaped dell, sleeping as he him- 
self had slept on the Capriote shore at his foe’s mercy, with 
one arm beneath his head and the other flung idly out- 
ward, in the loose linen dress of an Italian melon-seller^ 
(ay the Greek, Conrad FhauJcon. 

He motioned her to him with a gesture that let the 
leaves fall for an instant back into their places ; his teeth 


442 


ID ALIA. 


were clinched, his words hissed broken through them, his 
eyes were alight with the blood-thirst of desert animals. 

“ Look — look !’ 7 he gasped. “ There — at last — there in 
my power — the brute who shot me down 77 

He swept the boughs backward and upward once more 
with the dash of his arm, and she bent to look through the 
twilight of the leaves ; her face changed to the whiteness 
of death as her eyes fell on the upturned face of the sleep- 
ing man, her lips drew their breath gaspingly; a shiver of 
unutterable horror ran through her. 

“He ! — he !” 

That one word seemed all her voice could whisper, and 
in it a whole world of agony, loathing, remorse, hatred, and 
shame unbearable seemed told. 

Erceldoune, with the lifted boughs still held above their 
heads, stood and gazed at her in a horror scarce less than 
that with which the sight of the slumbering Greek had 
stirred her. 

“You know him !” 

She seized his wrist, and, with the convulsive force that 
comes to the most delicate women in their hours of ex- 
tremity, shook his grasp from the arm of the tree, whose 
foliage fell once more between them and the sight of that 
bright Athenian beauty that lay there in the careless rest 
of some sculpture of Lykegenes. 

“Know him ! — oh, my God ! Do I know him ?” 

“Ay ! Do you know the man who sought to murder 
me ? 77 

There was the first sternness of waking fury, the first un- 
conscious violence of stealing doubt, in the question as 
it broke from him, while he vainly sought to wrench his 
wrists from the close grasp she held them in, and be free 
to fall upon his enemy as lions fall on their foes. Vv 7 ith 
them her courage returned, her self-command came back to 
her, though her face was bloodless still, and a terrible an- 
guish w r as set on it; she looked him full in the eyes — eyes 
for the first time bent on her with the searching severity 
of an accuser. 

“ Yes. I know him. I did not know that he was your 
assassin, though — though — -I grant I feared it. 77 

“ Feared it 1 What is he to you 


AT SUNSET STRANDED. 


443 


She was silent. 

“ What is he to you — this brigand, this brute, this vilest 
of the vile scum of Europe ?” 

He spoke with the imperious vehemence of the intolera- 
ble horror that possessed him. She was silent still; over 
her face a hot flush came and went, the flush of an intense 
humiliation. 

“ What do you know of him ? Answer me, before I 
wring it out of his throat.” 

She shuddered where she stood; but, with a strength 
scarce less than his own, she held him from the place where 
the Greek slept, and drew him by sheer force farther and 
farther outward. 

'‘Let him be. He has been the curse of my fate; he 
will be the curse of yours.” 

“ By heaven, never 1 I will stamp his life out where he 
lies. Let me go — let me go.” 

“ Go for what ?” 

“ To deal with him — -justly.” 

“ Justly !” 

'‘Yes. Men kill murderers; and it was through no 
lack of will in him he was not one. I will not kill him 
sleeping, but I will wash my wrongs out once for all. Let 
me go !” 

She flung her arms close around him, so that he must 
have wrenched her beautiful limbs asunder before he could 
have left her; she drew him backward and backward, her 
breath against his cheek, her hair showered on his breast, 
her dignity broken, her self-control forgot, vivid emotion, 
agonized abandonment, making her a hundredfold more 
resistless in that hour than she had ever been in her proud- 
est moments of supremacy. She knew her power ; under 
that embrace he stood subdued, irresolute, remembering 
nothing except the loveliness he looked on. 

“ Is that your love ? Is that your trust ?” 

She felt a tremor run through all his frame — the tremor 
of the blind rage against his foe, of the blind idolatry of 
her, that warred within him. 

" I break neither, because I will deal with my assassin I 
What is he to you that you should shield him ?” 

The first taint of jealousy ran through the words. The 


444 


IDA LI A. 


tremor of shame that he had seen when her glance first 
fell upon the Greek passed over her ; yet her gaze met his, 
aud never sank beneath it. 

“ I cannot tell you.” 

There was an accent of hatred deep as his own in the 
low words ; he looked with a terrible eagerness into her 
eyes. 

11 Cannot! Wait. You say you never loved ; were you 
never wedded where you hate ?” 

u Never.” 

“ Then what is this villain to you ?” 

She seemed to shrink and shiver where his arms held her, 
as though his words stabbed her through and through. 
She held silence still. 

“ Tell me,” he swore to her, “ or, as he lives, that tiger 
shall, with my shot through his brain to pay for the con- 
fession 1” 

“ Hush, hush ! If he wakes, we are lost !” 

“ I will wake him in such fashion that he never wakes 
again ! My assassin your care ? Let me go — let me go, 
I tell you 1” 

He strove to put her arms from him, to fling off him the 
coil of her hair, to break from the paralyzing spell of her 
beauty; but she would not loosen him, she would not be 
shaken off — she drew him farther and farther from the 
Greek, let him seek as he would to escape from her. 

“ Oh, my beloved — my beloved ! where is the faith you 
promised me ? One trial — and it breaks ! With such a 
life as mine, do you not know that there must be far darker 
things than this to try you ? Have you not said that you 
Vill cleave to me through all ? Have you not refused to 
believe even my own word against me ?” 

“ God knows it, yes ! But ” 

“ Here is the first test, then ; were your oaths empty 
words ?” 

He was silent ; he stood motionless and unnerved under 
the brief touch of the rebuke. She knew that she had 
bound him in those withes of honor that he would never 
break ; and she knew that she had touched him in the one 
noble weakness that laid him utterly at her will and mercy. 
She loosened her arms from him ; she stood apart and left 
him free. 


AT SUNSET STRANDED. 


445 


“ Go, if x you will. Doubt me-^if you will. Avenge your 
wrong, if you will. But — if you do, we never meet again. 71 

His lips parted, without sound ; an anguish of appeal 
looked at her from his eyes ; he stood consumed by the 
passions of his hate and of his love, that strove with one 
another in a deadly conflict. 

“Choose, 77 she said, simply — and waited. 

His chest heaved with a mighty sigh. 

“ Great Heaven ! You ask me to spare him after such 
a crime ! 77 

“ I ask you nothing. Take your vengeance, it is your 
right; but you will never look upon my face again. 77 

“Because I am his foe ? 77 

“ No ! Because you doubt me. 77 

With that one word she pierced him to the quick. 

He had no strength, no memory, no thought, save of 
her and of her will ; he looked back once to where his 
slumbering traitor lay, with the mad longing of denied ven- 
geance in the look, then slowly, and with his head bent, he 
turned away. 

“ Be it as you will. I yield you to-day more than my 
life itself. 77 

And as she heard, all her coldness and her imperious 
resolve died out, as though they had not been ; she sank 
into his outstretched arms, and wept as she had never done 
in all her haughty womanhood — wept uncontrollably, ago- 
nizedly, in such abandonment, in such weakness, as the 
sovereign temper in her never, ere then, had known. 

At sight of that passionate grief he forgot hi3 own 
wrong, his own doubt, his very vengeance ; he remembered 
nothing, except that the woman for whom he would have 
laid down his life suffered thus, while to her suffering he 
could bring no more consolation than though he stood a 
stranger before her. It was not in him to have one thought 
of his own cause of hatred against this man, when once he 
saw that she endured this poignant and deadly pain through 
his assassin, this unutterable misery at sight of the sleeping 
Greek, whose face turned upward, with the sunset warmth 
and flickering shadow of the leaves playing on it, thus had 
broken all their dreams of the future, all the sweetness of 
their solitude. 


38 


446 


IDALIA. 


She lay passive some moments in his arms, her whole 
frame shaken by convulsive, tearless sobs. 

“ Oil God 1” she moaned. “And I dreamt of a Future, 
while he was living there !” 

A darkness like night swept over her lover’s face ; the 
evil spirit was upon him, which in the midnight chase 
through the moonlight of the Bosphorus shore had been, 
on him, thirsting for his enemy’s blood. He stooped his 
head over her, and his whisper was terribly brief : 

“ Let me go, and he will not be living long.” 

He had surrendered to her ; he had yielded up to her 
this vengeance, which had been the one goal of such cease- 
less search, such vain desire ; but though he had let her 
for awhile hold his hands from it, his whole heart, and soul, 
and passions were in tempestuous rebellion still ; his blood 
was hot for war, his conscience was strangled by hatred. 

“Let me go,” he whispered, thirstily. “You shall see 
him lie dead at your feet — dead, like the brave horse that 
rotted to carrion through him.” 

She shivered, as though an ice-cold wind had passed 
over her ; but danger had been too long her atmosphere, 
and the tempests of men’s hearts too loDg the powers by 
which she swayed them, not to nerve her to force and calm- 
ness when both were needed. She was deathly pale, ex- 
cept for those flushes of shame that had made the blood 
rush backward to her veins ; but she spoke tranquilly, lay- 
ing her hand upon his mouth, and with that command 
which never, in moments of need, deserted her. 

“ Peace ! Those are not like yourself — those tiger in- 
stincts. Leave them to him ; they are beneath you.” 

“ They are not ! They are my right.” 

“Is revenge ever a right?” 

“We deemed it so in old Scotland. A right divine 1” 

His face was stern and evil still, with the storm of his 
longing wrath, with the pent tide of his loosening jealousy. 

“ Divine ? Devilish ! Bight or wrong, lay it down for 
my bidding.” 

He was silent. Under her hands she felt the muscles of 
his arm thrill and swell, against her breast she felt the 
stifled panting of his breath. To hold him back, was like 
holding in leash a gazehound when it sees the stag. 


AT SUNSET STRANDED. 


447 


“Lay it down, or you are man-sworn, and forsworn. 
You talk of your ancient Scotland, how did she hold that 
dishonor ?” 

She spoke with a vivid intensity in the words, that left 
her clinched teeth so low, so slowly; she knew every chord 
in the nature of this man, as fine artists know every chord 
in the diapason of the instrument that echoes and vibrates 
to their slightest touch. 

He held his peace ; he would not break his word to her 
— break his word to a woman, and that woman defenseless, 
and his mistress, and his life’s pledged law ; but his hun- 
ger of desire was terrible to fall on that sleeping panther 
lying so near, and to deal on him ten thousand blows — 
blows for his own wrong at his assassin’s score, but blows 
a hundred times more strong because his foe was known 
and shielded by Idalia. 

She saw the struggle in him, and her heart went out to 
him in it — went out to the strength and the weakness that 
were so blent in it, the strength of honor and the weakness 
of passion. How often she had seen these two antagonists 
strive against each other to hold and to keep a man’s soul ! 

“ Oh, my love 1” she murmured, as she .drew him farther 
and farther from the place where his foe slept. “ Give me 
this one thing, and you shall have all my love. Let him 
be — let him be. He took all ; he shall not take you. 
Come, come, come !” 

He held back still, while still her arms clung to him, and 
drew him onward and onward to leave his murderer in 
peace. 

“ One word only,” he muttered, close in her ear, while 
his lips, as they brushed her throat, scorched it like fire. 
“You deny me my vengeance. Is it for love of me — or 
pity of himV ’ 

The eyes that he could have sworn were true, as he 
would have sworn that the stars shone above them, looked 
up long into his ; there was a depth of anguish in them 
that smote and stilled his passions as with a sudden awe. 

“Both. I love you, as I never thought in me to love 
the living or the dead ; and I pity him, as the longest, the 
latest, the most wretched of all my enemies, though they 
are many as the sands of the sea. Have I answered you 
now? Cornel” 


448 


ID ALIA. 


The intonation of the words, rather than their meaning, 
laid their own solemnity on him; he read that in her eyes, 
before which his own wrongs seemed to dwarf, and pale, 
and die out. 

“Do with me as you will,” he said to her, while his head 
sank and a great sigh escaped him. “ I cannot reach you 
— in all things — but I will follow as best I may.” 

She seemed to him so far above him with her royal past, 
that had given her the sway as the woes of royalties, with 
this lofty serene generosity from which she looked with 
compassion on one whom she declared the greatest enemy 
of her life. She started as if the homage stung her like an 
adder — as if the reverence of his words were some unbear- 
able shame. 

“Never say thatl Never — never. Follow me in no- 
thing. Teach me your own brave, straight, knightly creeds. 
Let me see your noble honesty of thought and purpose, 
and let me steep myself in truth, and have it cleanse me if 
I can ! Ah ! once before we go, let me hear you say that 
you forgive me. Forgive me all you know — forgive me all 
that is hidden from you 1” 

The remorse with which, in the dawn of that day, she 
had bidden him flee from her forever, the abasement that 
had broken down her dignity, and laid her subject before 
him, were tenfold intensified now — intensified to a burning 
misery of grief before him, to a humiliation that crushed 
down like a bent reed the bold spirit that had never quailed 
before the threats of the Roman tyrant, or the uplifted 
rods of his scourgers. She seemed broken by an unutter- 
able contrition ; stricken before him by the conscious guilt 
of a criminal before her judge ; the prayer for pardon 
seemed to pierce her lips before she knew that she uttered 
it, the thirst for his mercy seemed to be intense as if the 
crime against his life had been woven by her brain, and 
instigated by her will, although the hand of the Greek, 
sleeping unconscious in the hollowed cleft of rock below, 
had been her tool and servant. 

There was not one pause of doubt, one hesitation of 
dread, in the answer that rose from the grandest generosity 
in his nature, and came to her with a gentleness, grave and 
infinitely sad, that seemed upon her ear like the fall of some 
divine music. 


AT SUNSET STRANDED. 


449 


“ Forgive ! That is no word between you and me Yet, 
— if there be anything of pardon needed from my life to 
yours in past, or present, or future, I give the pardon now, 
once and forever ; you cannot stretch it farther than my 
love will yield it.” 

She heard, and her haughty head sank downward, till 
her lips touched his hand in the sign of homage and alle- 
giance that she had refused to the claim of monarchs. Her 
eyes were blind with tears, her heart was filled with a de- 
spair bitter as death, with a sweetness sweet as life ; he 
was at once her slave and her ruler, her judge and her 
savior. 

“Ah, God!” she said, in her soul. “ How vainly I 
sought for a great nature where great things dwelt, and 
great ambitions governed ! I never found it till now; and 
now — how little it knows itself as great !” 

Without a word he loosed her from his arms, as though 
by that abstinence from any utterance or caress of passion 
to show that no mere passion goaded him to the forgive- 
ness which a higher and purer tenderness bestowed, and 
would so bestow through the uttermost ordeal, and up to 
the last hour. Silently he led the horses from the place, 
their hoofs noiselessly sinking in the rank deep grass, drew 
the girths closer, and made the few preparations that were 
needed for their night- ride to the sea ; and below, far down 
under the cedar shelter, where the sun-rays never strayed, 
the Athenian lay, sunk in the dreamless sleep of a profound 
exhaustion, a fatigue careless where it dropped down to 
rest so that it might lie on unawakened, undisturbed. 

His foe was left in peace ; a heavier surrender to her 
than any that had ever been made, many and wide and 
weighty though they were, the sacrifices that she had wooed, 
or commanded from those who had no law save only the 
bidding of her lips. His heart was sick within him ; every 
vein was on fire with the lion’s longing for the lion’s spring. 
The old religion of revenge, which had been sacred to his 
forefathers in the age when murderers were proven by bier- 
right, and for wrong the flaming cross of war was borne 
alight over moor and mountain, was in many a moment his 
religion still ; it was “ wild justice” in his eyes, and a justice 
best meted out from foe to foe without the judgment of any 
2D 38* 


450 


IDALIA. 


alien voice. To turn away and leave bis enemy anaroused ; 
to skulk and flee as though he were the evil-doer; to let 
the murderer lie there unawakened, unarraigned, instead of 
forcing him from slumber to answer for his guilt with life, 
— a deadlier thing she could not have demanded at his 
hands. 

The sweetness of the day had died with the setting of 
the sun, and the darkness of night had fallen on their lives 
as on the earth where they dwelt. Silently they mounted, 
silently they passed away, the tramping of feet lost on the 
yielding moss, on the thick herbage ; silently they turned 
and looked backward with a long and lingering gaze at the 
forest roof which well might prove their last refuge to- 
gether, the last shelter in which they should ever dream of 
freedom and of a future. Then through the first shadows 
of evening, under the deep gloom of the woods, beside the 
melancholy moaning of the hidden river channels, they went 
onward to their flight from Church and King,* onward to 
the sea, if they could ever reach the sweet fresh liberty of 
its wide waters. 

And as they went — where the leafy depths inclosed, and 
the forest twilight hid them — the Greek rose slowly, with 
the heavy lethargy of sleep, and the staggering weakness 
of overwrought fatigue still on him, like some fierce yet 
timorous panther that has been roused from rest to a craven 
dread and a longing for slaughter both in one. Through 
his sleep words had come to him, mingling with his dreams ; 
instincts had stirred in him while yet the weight of that 
deathlike slumber had laid like lead on his eyelids ; a voice 
had roused the dormant images of memory ; a sense of 
some presence, some peril, some rising of hate and of fear, 
had come on him ere he had been sensible ; he had shaken 
the clinging stupor from him with supreme effort ; he had 
glanced upward through the boughs of cedar ; he had 
made one eager, springing movement like a panther, with 
the panther’s lust in his eyes, and a thousand warring pas- 
sions at his heart ; — then the craft of his nature, the cow- 
ardice of his nation, conquered the bolder and more fero- 
cious impulse, as well as the jealous, wayward, tyrannous 
affection that still, with all his vice, lived in him ; the dread 
of his antagonist was blent with the instinct of his biood 


AT SUNSET STRANDED. 


451 


toward treachery in the place of defiance. He feigned 
sleep afresh, lying as though still in the profound peace of 
that dreaming rest ; lying so with the soft brown lashes on 
his cheek, and his head idly thrown back upon his arm, 
until the hoofs of the horses had ceased to crush the cyclo- 
men and hellebore, and the screen of forest foliage had 
fallen between him and the man he hated with the reckless 
bitterness of the injurer to the injured, the woman whom 
he loved despite all, though he adored tyranny and evil, 
and gold and selfish gains, and the brutal exercise of a 
pitiless jealousy, far more. 

Then, as they passed away, he staggered to his feet, 
and stood a moment, in the red after-glow that streamed 
upon him, erect, quivering, instinct with passion, like some 
lithe, beautiful, murderous forest beast, the hot and ruddy 
light burning in the glow of his eyes, and cast luridly on 
the spirited head aud perfect form that were graceful and 
splendid as the legendary beauty of Arinthceus. 

“She can love ? The world should end to-night P 

The words broke from him where he stood alone. All 
through the years since first he had won into his toils the 
young sovereign of the Vassalis dominion, the heir of the 
great dead Julian, the dreamer of dreams so grand, so 
pure, so impossible in their sublime ambitious, that their 
very greatness had been made the element of her own de- 
struction, he had never known love in its faintest touch 
pass over her proud heart; merciless in awaking passion, 
no stroke of it had ever recoiled upon her ; with the 
power of the sorceress she had had also the sorceress’s 
immunity from the danger of the spells by which she 
wrought ; many had thought that they had gained their 
entrance to her heart — many had thought so when so she 
chose to dupe them — but all had found, too late, that 
there was no essay more hopeless than to seek to stir to 
tenderness the haughty coldness and carelessness of her 
strength, to seek to waken one echo of fondness from the 
superb negligence and levity of her ironic scorn. He had 
never known her love even once roused ; he had sworn 
that, if ever that passion touched her, he to whom it were 
given should yield up as his price no less coin than life. 


452 


XDALIA. 


CHAPTER XXIX. 

BESIDE THE SEA. 

By dawn they had reached the shore, having bent far 
northward of where Naples lay, and so round to the sea. 

Here the worn-out horses, fasting and drenched with 
steam, and quivering with fatigue at the close of a second 
night of that breathless race, staggered, trembling under 
the great shadow of a mighty wall of cliff that rose sheer 
upward from the breadth of smooth and yellow sand, its 
sides jagged and honeycombed, its crest overhung with 
festoons of wild vine, and crowned with the gray plumes 
of olive, the waters idly lapping the amber beach below, 
and stretching league on league outward till the dim sea- 
line and the mist-laden skies of morning blent in one. In- 
voluntarily she stretched her hands out to it in welcome 
and in prayer, as though the Sea-born of her fathers lived 
and heard. 

“ Oh waters ! give me your liberty.” 

They looked so wide, so cool, so deeply still, stretching 
out in their measureless freedom to the infinite. 

“It is gentler than earth,” she muttered. “Men die 
hardly on the bitterness of the land — the land which de- 
vours them that she may blossom and laugh with fruits 
born of corruption ! — but the very death that the sea gives 
is dreamy and tranquil And the sea will not render its 
dead, but loves them, and lulls them, and holds them ever 
with their stories untold ! Where is there any other thing 
so merciful as that ?” 

There was the longing of a melancholy, weary to de- 
spair, through the poet-like thought of the murmured 
words; in that moment she would gladly have sought the 
unbroken rest that could alone be found in the deep sea- 
bed, beneath those fathomless and changeless waves. 

She sank down on a broken pile of rock, with the ribbed 


BESIDE THE SEA. 


453 


sand at lier feet, and the bulwark of the mighty cliff rising 
above ; her face was colorless, haggard, almost stern, as 
though there were set on it such hatred of herself that all 
its youth and brilliancy changed to one bitter heart-sick 
scorn ; her hair was thrust back off her brow ; her eyes 
looked with a tearless, thirsty longing over the waters. 
There had been silence between them well-nigh through all 
the hours of that night-ride to the sea ; there was silence 
still ; he stood beside her with the darkness of her thoughts 
flung back on his, with the tempestuous passions that he 
had choked down at her will burning and aching in him 
still. ✓ 

“ You are certain ?” she said, suddenly, at last. 

A heavier darkness came upon his face. 

“ Do you think men forget their murderers ?” 

Her teeth clinched on one another, as though to grind 
the starting words to silence ; she laughed slightly — a 
laugh that sent a shudder through his blood. 

“ Well — your murderer was the man that had the hew- 
ing and the shaping of my life. Do you wonder now that 
it was evil V 1 

“ Of yours ? Oh God !” 

She laughed still faintly ; that laugh that has a misery 
which never yet lay in tears. 

“A fair comrade ! — a noble tutor ! What think you ? 
A lofty close for my imperial ambitions, is it not ? A 
priest’s cell my prison-house, a criminal’s flight my safety, 
a thief and an assassin my associate, my ” 

Her teeth closed once more, shutting in the word that 
would have escaped them ; a shiver of agony shook him 
as he heard ; his breath came in slow stifled gasps ; he 
had thought that he could never suffer, once knowing that 
her love was his, once having felt her lips upon his own, 
yet he suffered now as he had never done in all the years 
of his life. 

“ Twice you have checked my vengeance, and bidden 
me ‘spare’!” he muttered, in the fierceness of a torture 
that made his words almost savage. “ If these brutes be 
your foes, why call me off their throats ?” 

“A lion shall not choke snakes,” she said, briefly. 

The brevity gave the deeper meaning to the words. 


454 


ID ALIA. 


“ Why speak in parables ? You must know ” 

“ That your faith is dying ? Well, let it die.- It has 
every right. I will not reproach you !” 

The bitter despairing hatred softened from her features, 
and the sweeter sadness, that grieved less for herself than 
him, followed it once more. His eyes turned on her, filled 
with hot cruel tears. 

“ It will never die. But — why should you wring my 
heart to test it ?” 

“ Test it ! Ah ! do not wrong me like that ! Do you 
think I would cause you an instant’s pain that was in my 
power to spare? Do you think I would spend a woman’s 
miserable chicaneries and heartless vanities on you, or 
triumph in them at your cost ?” 

Her voice had changed to intense appeal, to vivid emo- 
tion, and she held his hands close against her heart, look- 
ing upward at him with a longing that broke down all her 
courage and her pride— the longing that he, at least, should 
know that she was true to him, though she must withhold 
him from his justice, and deny him all he had a title to 
hear. 

“Answer me !” she pursued, while her eyes gazed into 
his. “ Be my law, my conscience — I have been steeped so 
long in evil, I have lost all fitness to judge honor or dis- 
honor aright ! To tell you all, to lay my life before you 
as it should be laid, I must break my oath, I must belio 
my word, I must be false to the chief thing that has ever 
redeemed my past. Answer me — shall I do it?” 

She saw a tremor shake him as a great storm shakes the 
rooted strength of cedars; his head sank, his mouth quiv- 
ered ; a fierce and cruel conflict was waged in him. For 
awhile he hesitated ; torn by a deadly anguish of desire to 
speak the word that should unloose the bonds of silence 
between them. 

Then a brave gentleman’s inborn instincts conquered him, 
and spoke in his answer : 

“No. Be true to yourself, and you will never be false 
to me. For the rest, you know me. I can wait.” 

And she who heard him knew that with that refusal he 
had put from him what cost him more in the renunciation 
than scepters laid aside have cost to those who put them 


BESIDE TIIE SEA. 


455 


by at tbe dictation of a pure and generous honor beyond 
all selfish sway, as his was now beyond it. 

“ You are great beyond men’s nobility,” she said, briefly. 
In that momentary weakness she had longed that he should 
bid her sacrifice her word and her bond to him, but he was 
far higher and dearer in her sight because he denied that 
weakness its way; she had much strength herself, and she 
loved such strength in men. “ But — but — have you no 
fear when I tell you my life has been tainted by such as he ?” 

The red blood rushed over his forehead, his teeth crushed 
in a mighty curse. 

“I have but the fear that, if I look ever on his face 
again, I shall turn murderer like him.” 

A sickening shudder passed over her. 

“Nay! why not revenge yourself on me? I was his 
associate. How can you know I was not his accomplice ?” 

11 How! Have I not looked into your eyes ?” 

The infinite trust and tenderness that the reply breathed 
was rather in the tone than in the words. 

“ My eyes ! What do a woman’s eyes ever do but lie ? 
And yet look, look forever, if you will, so that you learn 
from them that my heart is truth, but that my past is 
shame 1” 

Her head sunk, her gaze was fastened on the ebbing sea 
with an intense despair, her courage was broken and abased 
at last. 

He stood beside her, silent ; his faith would not leave 
nor his love forsake her, but the abyss of a heavy guilt 
yawned between them, the barrier of a pitiless silence 
severed them. The words of the Holy Mother of Monas- 
tica came back upon his memory : 

“ Take to your bosom that flower alone which lives in 
the fullness of light, and folds no leaves unopened from your 
gaze.” 

But passion and faith were strong in him ; stronger than 
wisdom, stronger than vengeance. He stooped and laid 
his lips upon her brow. 

“ The shadow of others’ shame may darken you ; no 
shame of yours is on you. Whatsoever you are — be mine !” 

The sea stretched outward, league on league of still gray 
water, with no color on it in the young hours of the dawn. 


IDALIA. 


*56 

no life, save the movement here and there of some awaken- 
ing ocean bird. The cliffs, tawny and water-stained and 
sun-browned, rose aloft, carving inward, and shaping one 
of the many indents of the irregular southern coast ; mighty 
shafts of stone that seemed to touch the skies, and were 
deeply riven here and there in fissures filled with the cling- 
ing of the vine. Grand, solitary, wild, there was no hu- 
man aid, no boat’s help to be looked for here. 

The sea lay there, but between them and liberty it 
stretched, an inexorable desert, impassable, and giving no 
freedom except death. 

“ Moments are years ; we cannot waste them,” he mut- 
tered, as he looked across the waters, where no sail broke 
the space, and upward at the rocks which frowned, sterile 
and lonely, locking in the breadth of ribbed beach-sand. 
44 A fisher-boat, sea-worthy, might save us still. I know 
a village that should lie not far from this. A cluster of 
fishing-cabins ” 

44 Yes, there is one. Let me think.” 

She paused awhile, seeking in half-forgotten memories 
for all her knowledge of the coast. 

44 Yes, a mile northward of us. A few huts under the 
cliff, and men with the sea’s strength in them when once 
they are afloat. Go you to them ; they may surely have 
a felucca that could cross that motionless sea.” 

44 Go ! And leave you ?” 

44 Else we must perish together. There is no help here.” 

44 Better that 1” 

44 No ; you shall not die by Bourbon steel for me. I am 
known well in the country ; the story of my arrest must be 
common to all now. This mask-dress, which is all they 
left me, would draw curiosity at once. You look like a 
marinaro ; you can hire the boat unsuspected, you can 
steer here, and, once here, with our pistols at their fore- 
heads we can make the sailors take what way we will. Go. 
I shall tire if any danger come. You will hear the shot 
far in this still air.” 

44 Is there no other way ?” 

“None. Leave me — there is no fear. And, in truth, I 
could not move farther yet. I am worn out at last.” 

She spoke faintly, wearily, and a gray death-like hue had 
stolen over all her face, where she leaned, her head upon 


BESIDE THE SEA. 


457 


her arm, her eyes lusterless, and with their lids heavily 
drooped, looking outward at the sea, whose grave she 
coveted. The fearlessness that had challenged death ; the 
force that had endured any torture rather than purchase 
peace and liberty by the betrayal of comrades; the high 
and dauntless spirit that had laughed at danger, and loved 
peril for its very hazard’s sake, — these, which would never 
have yielded to any tyranny, or pang, or jeopardy that 
could have tried them, were unstrung and crushed by the 
horror which had possessed her from the first moment that 
she had seen the sleeping Greek and heard his crime — his 
craven sin of craft and slaughter. Humiliation rested on 
her ; the deadliest suffering such a nature as hers can ever 
know — a thing which, until the sun had set in the past day, 
had never touched her temper. A shame that was inef- 
faceable seemed to her burnt into her life forever, and under 
it a strength which had never succumbed, a dignity which 
had never blenched or quailed before the sternest trials, 
surrendered at last. She had had the fortitude of men, 
the fearlessness of soldiers, but they seemed for the hour 
at least to die out in her now. 0 

He looked at her, and he saw that the privations of her 
prison, the scant food of many days, the high-strung ten- 
sion, and the exhausting exertions of the long and breath- 
less ride, had told heavily upon her ; and he who would 
have coined his very life to purchase aid for her, could do 
no more for her than the flock of monacci that flew past 
them with the breaking of the morning light. 

He struck his heel into the sand with an agony of power- 
less grief. 

“Great God ! you will perish here of hunger, of thirst, 
of sunstroke, of misery ! We were better in a desert than 
thus. I will go. I will bring help, if there be help on 
earth.” 

He went down the low strip of sanded shore, under the 
beetling shadow of the cliffs, northward to the fishing vil- 
lage on the edge of the waters, with low rounded cabin- 
roofs that were like clustered brown bee-hives beneath the 
giant shadow of the rocks. The wall of stone that shelved 
so high upward into the earth-hovering clouds screened 
him from view ; the hamlet was a mile or more along the 
39 


458 


IDALIA. 


coast ; she was alone, with the hound at her feet, the loaded 
weapon in her hand, the glistening sea ebbing away into 
the distance where her eyes were fixed. 

She sat motionless, while the noise of his footfall on the 
wet sands died gradually away. She listened to it till its 
last faint sound. 

“Ah ! if only for his sake he could pass out from my life 
forever,” she murmured. “Either way I must sin to him; 
— kill him by forsaking him, or betray him by wedding 
with him. To go to his heart with such dishonor as that 
untold ” 

She could have wished that the stroke of the red sun, 
rising stormily eastward, could reach and still her life, that 
the gray waves rolling slowly one on another to her feet 
could come to her and wash her down into their darkness. 
For she felt tainted with an assassin’s craven crime ; she 
felt driven into a traitor’s guilt of secrecy and shame. She 
laughed a little, with the unutterable weariness of futile 
pain, w r ith the ironic temper which had so long made jest 
of every suffering, that it scarce now spared her own. 

“I know now r w T hat sort of despair fills monasteries and 
makes saints I” she thought. “ How honorable to Deity, 
to give him the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked existence !” 

Twelve hours before she had said, and said truly, that 
no Yassalis ever failed; she had known that her life had 
been great in much even while blamable, it might be, in 
more; she had spoken of a future, in which much of do- 
minion, of magnificence, of a pure and noble ambition 
would still linger — a future in the glow of eastern suns, in 
the lands of her inheritance, in the sovereignty of a chief- 
tainship, where boundless evil remained to be conquered, 
and boundless liberty to be enjoyed — a future in conso- 
nance with the hatred of all bondage and the genius to 
rule, that were inborn in her. Yet now — now, since she 
had stooped down and seen the ruddy after-light upon the 
face of the slumbering Athenian — an endless night seemed 
to have fallen on her, and every dream of future and of 
freedom to be mockery. 

Through the silence of the quiet dawn she sat without 
any movement ; her hand closed on the butt of the pistol, 
and its mouth toward the sand ; the half dead horses had 


BESIDE THE SEA. 


459 


staggered under the shadow of the cliff, and were feebly 
trying to find food from the sea-salted grasses and drink 
from the brackish pools ; there was no sound, except the 
monotonous chiming of the Mediterranean at her feet, no 
refuge in the hard and barren surface of the colossal sea- 
wall. She had sent him from her, chiefly for his sake, that 
he should not wait beside her till he was netted by the 
Church’s webs, or slaughtered by the monarchist’s steel, 
and an unutterable loneliness was about her; there seemed 
no mercy on the face of the waters, but only a cold and 
dreary smile. Beyond them lay liberty; but she felt as 
though even the force to arise and seek it had been killed 
in her. 

Time passed in slow, sickening measure; the sullen light 
of a tempestuous morning burned higher in the heavens ; 
full day was come; the couchant hound awoke with menace 
in his eyes; across the sands at her feet a shadow fell; 
there was no sound, no word, but she felt the presence, as 
men feel the gliding abhorred presence of a snake, the 
stealing velvet-footed approach of a tiger, ere they knew 
that either are near. She started, and rose to her feet, 
and fell slowly backward step by step, till she rested against 
the wall of cliff, her gaze in the fascination of horror fas- 
tened on Conrad Phauicon as he stood, with the crimson 
sun in his face, and the gray water lying in a lonely waste 
behind him, his contadino’s dress disordered, his forehead 
darkly flushed, his mouth working as the words halted in 
their furious utterance : 

“ Ho Miladi 1 others can ride a wild ride besides your 
lover and you. I have been on your track all the night 
through ; I have scotched you at last. Where is he ? — 
where ? Answer me, or ” 

She threw up her hands with a grand gesture of silence, 
that even in that moment cursed him : 

“ Hush ! Never dare breathe his name ! — you, his rob- 
ber, his assassin.” 

The Greek’s lips paled and shook. 

“Robber 1 Assassin ! Strange words to me.” 

The fire of his wrath was bated an instant before the 
resurrection of the crime he had deemed buried beneath 
the solitary shadows of the Carpathian pine- woods. 


460 


IDALIA 


tl Would that they were strange to you ! Why did you 
swear falsely ? I knew that coward sin had your hand in 
it, and you swore by the only memory you have ever rev- 
erenced that you were innocent. I believed you — I was 
fool enough for that! — because, though treachery was 
your native air, you still at your worst had never taken 
perjured oath by that one name.” 

She spoke slowly, wearily, with an unutterable reproach 
and bitterness in the quiet words; under them he was for 
the moment cowed ; ho shook slightly through all the 
splendor of his limbs, and his teeth gnawed the gold curls 
of his beard. 

“ It was for what you worship — Liberty I” he stam- 
mered, with a sullen shame. 

“ Liberty I No marvel that the peoples are in chains if 
the apostles of their freedom think to serve them thus !” 

The words echoed over the stillness of the gray and 
tranquil seas with a profound eternal pathos ; it was the 
sigh of the Girondists, when through the death-mists of the 
scaffold they saw the angel of freedom they had dreamed 
of changed into a vampire of blood. 

The man before her, the lover who had left her, were 
alike forgot ; in that moment her heart was with the na- 
tions of the earth, the blind who find but the blind to lead 
them when they escape the iron heel to track them down ; 
the vast sum of suffering and heart-sick humanity that has 
no choice betwixt those who leave it to perish in its 
slough, or beat it forth to rot on battle-fields, and those 
who fill its parching throat with the fetid water of dis- 
torted truths, and fool its patient ignorance with lying 
grossness, that by it they may force upward into power. 

First — beyond all, grief for them was w r ith her ; for 
those innumerable, uncounted, uncompassionated millions 
who are the prey alike of despot and of demagogue ; by 
each alike condemned to be the long, unnoted, pitilessly 
consumed coil of fuse, lit and burnt out. to bear the flame 
by which ambition may show red against the skies, or to 
carry incendiarism in a conqueror’s van. This reigned 
with her beyond all things ; had so reigned ever, and would 
reign until her grave ; this impersonal love, this infinite 
pity for the concrete suffering, the weary destinies of the 


BESIDE THE SEA. 


461 


peoples, on whom “ the burden of the unintelligible world n 
is bound so hardly, so unequally. 

Phaulcon, stung, enraged, shame-maddened, laughed out 
in defiance of the scorn that lashed him like a whip of 
scorpions. 

“ Fine acting — you were always a fine actress ! — but this 
could come as nothing new to you, Miladi. You were sure 
enough that my friends and I were in it ” 

“ God forgive me ! I was sure until you swore your 
innocence ; and then — though I might have known that 
truth trying to pass your lips would become falsehood in 
such tainted passage i — I did you too much honor, and— 
believed you.” 

No virulence and no invective could have cast on him so 
much shame and so much scorn as these last two words. 

He laughed coarsely and carelessly still ; where he felt 
himself a coward there he became a bravo ; with the rank- 
ling wound of humiliation came the brutalized instinct to 
insult. 

11 Said you believed me rather ! The Countess Yassalis 
was always famous for her finesses. Beyond a doubt she 
had the tact to assume a fitting ignorance of anything that 
might have compromised her, and, by all appearances, set 
her desires on this colossal courier in a fashion that would 
have made it awkward, had he chanced to know that she 
was banded with his (what is the word?) assassins !” 

The blood rushed over the weary dignity of her face ; 
she looked him full in the eyes till his own fell ; she deigned 
no further answer. 

“Idalial” he stammered, more huskily and hurriedly; 
he had always, of later years, feared her even while he tor- 
tured her. 

“ You have lost all title to call me by that name. Put 
land and sea between us henceforth for evermore. Never 
let me look upon your face again — never, never, never 1” 

Her voice losing its controlled coldness, broke from her 
with an irresistible intensity, while as her arm pointed 
outward to the waters, she shuddered from him as men 
shudder from some loathed corruption, and banished him 
irom every soil she touched, from every air she breathed. 
For one moment the force of the magnificent gesture, 
39 * 


4G2 


IB ALIA. 


rather than of the words of banishment, thrilled, awed, 
intimidated him; he shrank a little, and fell back involun- 
tarily a step oi two upon the tawny sands. 

“Go, go 1” she said, still with that movement of her 
hands which thrust him from her with such superb com- 
mand as that wherewith the Scandinavian priest thrust 
back with his golden crosier the bloodstained King who 
came with murder on his soul. “ Go 1 Show the only 
remorse and reparation that you can still reach, and let my 
life be free of you forever.” 

Again it had its weight on him, that sentence of ban- 
ishment, grandly given, yet withal having in it a certain 
aching regret as of one who once had loved him well, 
though he had fallen ; as of one who owed him deadliest 
wrong and abhorred in him deadliest guilt, yet who, ;or 
memories not wholly perished, could not yield him up ua- 
pitied to the dominion of evil, to the wreck of body and 
soul. He remembered all that this woman had endured 
through him ; he remembered how by him shameful treach- 
ery had attainted the glorious morning of her youth ; how 
by him shadows that could never wholly pass from her had 
been flung across the splendor of her womanhood. 

“ Idalia, hear me a second,” he said, with a gentler ac- 
cent in the hesitation of the words. “You think I bear 
you no tenderness — I do, by Heaven I do, though often I 
come so near to hate you. If I had been at Antina, that 
Homan brute should never have touched you. Now — now 
and ever since I first heard of you in his fangs, I have been 
seeking you. And it is in peril of my life I stay an hour 
in the kingdom ; twofold peril — from the Bourbon’s grip, 
and from one surer still to know it and to strike.” 

“ Surer ? One does not live.” 

“ Yes, one does ; one that is ten thousand eyes and ears 
and lips incorporate, one that is thrice ten thousand intel- 
lects fused together, one that may strike me down from 
behind, and throw me like a dead dog into a wayside ditch, 
only for this, that I disobeyed and stayed in Naples to be 
near your prison.” 

She gave an involuntary movement, half shudder and 
half sigh ; she knew that the “ many in one” he spoke of, 
the far-reaching invisible hand, the wide, unerring previ- 


BESIDE THE SEA. 


4G3 


sion and condign vengeance that he dreaded, were those of 
the political society to which he had been bound in the 
early days of his manhood, when fretting poverty nad 
goaded, restless intrigue had allured, and a warped yet at 
the first not ignoble love of freedom and of country bad 
impelled him to its far-spread nets. 

“ You say this ? So you also said, by all you held most 
sacred, that you had no share in and no knowledge of this 
attempted murder ?” 

She spoke slowly, and with icy chillness that cast back 
on him a hundredfold more piercingly than by invective 
the thousand times of falsehood when he had dealt treach- 
erously by her, and so forfeited all right, all power to force 
on her that he now uttered truth. The last two words cut 
asunder, and broke down as though they had never been, 
the softer, better thought, that in the moment previous had 
made him well-nigh forget all else except the peril of death, 
or of a life worse than death, to which she, wronged in so 
much, had but so late escaped by a hair’s breadth. All his 
jealous hate leaped up aflame. 

In that instant while she spoke the fear had passed from 
him, the knowledge of his power had risen again ; jealousy, 
and avarice, and passionate lust of tyranny were stronger- 
lived in him than the sting of conscience, than the awaken- 
ing of shame. He hated her now with a ruthless hate, in 
which such wavering and selfish love as he had through all 
borne her, died. 

“ Perdition I You balked me once in my night’s work. 
You will not make me miss him again. Wait an instant,” 
he said through his teeth. “ There is too close a tie be- 
tween us for us to part in that fashion.” 

“ To a tie that you have outraged you cannot appeal.” 

“ We are too needful to each other to sever so ” 

“ I am needful to you, doubtless. But you will never 
again make of me, or tool, or weapon, or guide, or gold- 
mine for your evil service.” 

“Ah ! Fine thing a woman’s word. But a few days 
since you told me, with imperial scorn, that you had some 
ieverence for your oath?” 

“ I had ; — how much, let all I have lost, and sinned, and 
wrecked, and slain for you bear witness.” 


464 


ID ALIA. 


“And yet ! ” 

“And yet — here in your hands I break it, and break 
from it. I am absolved from my vows forever. I swore 
them to a patriot ; you I know not — you , a brigand, an 
assassin !” 

“ Is an apostate nobler than an assassin, then, that you 
vaunt your treachery and upbraid mine ?” 

“Nobler in nothing; but apostaey is your guilt, riot- 
mine. To truth, to liberty, to the peoples, I am loyal; 
you have forsaken these — forsaken ! were you ever true to 
them ? did ever you know aught of them ? — and leagued 
yourself with fraud, with avarice, with slaughter.” 

“Bitter words, madame.” 

“Bitter? God pardon you! — if you heard but sheer 
and simple justice of all your traitorous guilt to me, would 
not the blackest words in language fail to yield your due ? 
But — let us part in silence ; I cannot give you over to 
your proper fate, for the sake of the only life we ever cher- 
ished in common. But tempt my vengeance — my justice — 
no longer ; if you are wise, go — go while I can still let 
you go unharmed.” 

“ I stayed, at peril of life, to succor you if I could, to 
learn your fate, to find your enemies, and, in reward of 
that, saw you ten hours ago lavishing love upon your 
foreign favorite, on his heart, in his arms — you!” 

“ Well ?” 

She looked him full in the eyes still, with a deep and 
steady gaze ; there was a firm, lowering gloom in her own, 
like trie look which comes into the eyes of one who, brave 
and resolved, still counts the danger that lies before him, 
and finding it vast, yet resolves but the more fixedly to go 
through it. 

“ You did it belike to dupe him ?” he pursued, with the 
insolent riot of his silver-toned laughter, the louder because 
lie had no belief in his own translation of her acts. “ He 
had a strong arm to force back your jail bars, and a wild 
brain to be lulled with your charming. You played the 
comedy with many — who so well ? — was it but acted once 
again with him ? You have done scores of finer finesses, 
and daintier and more dangerous things, in waking love 
than so easy a victory as blinding and duping this Scottish 


BESIDE THE SEA. 


46 J 


athlete, and you have fooled men for far less stakes than 
to free yourself from the gripe of our holy Monsignore. 
Tell me that was your project, and I will pardon it, though 
you blackened my name so heavily in the little melodrama. 
Was it ? Yes, or no 1” 

“No ! ” 

The answer was brief and cold ; she knew that for it this 
man was like enough to fire into her bosom, where he stood 
before her, the weapon whose muzzle thrust itself out from 
the folds of his striped canvas shirt. 

For once he kept himself cool ; she knew him then to 
be at his worst ; his vehement, eloquent, womanish passion 
of wrath was never so dangerous as when, contrary to all 
his temperament, he held it in check and waited, softly, 
silently, warily. 

“No ?” he laughed in echo. “ What ! has Miladi Yas- 
salis gone scathless in her scorn for all these years to be 
charmed by a rough rider’s mountain sinews and gigantic 
limbs at last ! Bathos ! — terrible bathos ! And what will 
you do, madame, with your new lover ? — have him killed 
to keep the secret of your weakness, like that fair frail 
Jewess of the French Regency of whom we read ?” 

Under the coarse infamy of the sneer her face never 
flushed, her eyes never relaxed their sturdy challenge of 
him ; but a hatred beyond all words gathered darkly in 
her regard, a scorn beyond all words set on her colorless 
lips. 

“What will you do with him ?” he repeated, scoffingly. 
“ How will you square his claims and mine ? If you should 
get your liberty again, my Countess, your favorite courier 
will slightly embarrass you!” 

“ You possess no claims.” 

“ Truly ? We will see that. But first, what will you do 
with him ?” 

“ What shall I do ? I will tell you. Give him my life, 
and defy yours.” 

“Ah 1 As his mistress or his wife ?” 

“ His wife.” 

“Indeed! And make h’m a chieftain in Roumelia, 1 
suppose ?” 

“ Why not ?” 


466 


IDALIA. 


“Why not, truly! He will be admirably fitted to play 
the mountain king, the barbaric lord; and you — well, your 
new fancy may endure six months. I will give it that lease 
of life ; and then — men easily disappear in those -hill fast- 
nesses, where every creature is your humble vassal !” 

Her face flushed with a dark tempestuous shadow a? 
she heard; she gave one movement, rapid, passionate, in- 
voluntary — it was to raise her pistol for the signal shot. 
The gesture was restrained ; she looked her antagonist 
firmly in the eyes. 

“ Cease this. There are none here to be cheated with 
your outrages, and to insult me will bring you no result. 
Once for all, hear and understand ; — this one man has be- 
come dear to me, and, what is more, is honored by me. I 
shall be true to him, and I shall defend him — as he has 
given truth and defense to me.” 

The words were very passionless, but they were inflexi- 
ble as steel ; his face changed lividly as he heard. 

“Wait!” he said, savagely, as he seized her wrist. 
“You know the fate we give deserters?” 

She calmly loosed her arm from him. 

“ Death ? Well, you can slay me if you will. It will 
worthily close your course. But be sure of this — you will 
not scare me with the threat of it.” 

“ Threat ! Miladi, you will find it more than threat.” 

“ Too likely. But I shall be his before it becomes fact.” 

“What! you love him well enough to risk death for 
him — such a death ! — by night, by stealth, in your beauty, 
in your youth ?” 

“Else should I love little.” 

The Greek ground hard his beautiful smiling teeth, and 
looked at her in silence a moment. He had dealt with her 
in many moods, but never yet in one where this passion 
ruled her. He had never known its pulse beat in her ; he 
was stunned and bewildered by his own rage ; ho could 
almost have found it in his soul to deal her there and then 
the fate that she so tranquilly accepted and defied. 

“ Wait, then,” he said, while his words stole out one by 
one, ferocious, but yet slow and chill as ice. “ You do 
not fear it for yourself — do you for him ?” 

She did not answer ; he saw a slight shiver pass over 


“serpent’s voice less subtle than her kiss.” 46T 

her; he had foand the one weak link through which to 
pierce the armor of her proud and resolute strength. 

“ You do ? That is well. Then listen to one warning : 
the first night this man sleeps in your arms shall be his 
last. Wed him and kill him, if you like 1” 


CHAPTER XXX. 

“THE SERPENT’S VOICE LESS SUBTLE THAN HER KISS.” 

The fishing hamlet lay under the shadow of a great 
sea-worn, red-brown, sullen cliff, that had the mists of the 
dawn still on its rugged forehead, and the foam of the up- 
rising tide now angrily splashing its feet ; a mighty for- 
tress of rock, that would break from its gloom to a won- 
derful beauty when the sun should come round to the west, 
and the glory spread over the waters. There were but 
four or five cabins, dropped in among the loose piles of 
stone and the pale plumes of the sand grasses ; huts low 
nestled, and hidden like the nests on northern beaches of 
the sea-hovering tern. And these, few as they were, were 
deserted ; the men had been out two days and two nights 
with their boats and their nets — out far beyond where 
craggy Ischia lay, and their woman- kind were alone left, 
with children like Murillo’s beggars, wild haired and 
ruddy cheeked, and with naked limbs of a marvelous 
mould and grace, who lived all day long waist-deep in 
water, and slept all night long on a wet soil, and not sel- 
dom crushed the seaweed between their bright hard teeth 
in the sheer longing of famine, and yet who, with all that, 
might have thanked God, had they known it, that they 
were born by the water’s width and to the water’s liberty, 
instead of in the stifling agony of cities, where human 
lives breathe their first and their last, never having known 
what one breath of ocean wind blows like, or what the 
limitless delight of a horizon line can mean. The wo- 


403 


IDALIA. 


men were fine animals — and nothing more. Those who 
were young were splendidly colored and built; those who 
were past youth were sere, and yellow, and scaly as the 
fish they smoked and hung to the beams of their huts for 
the winter’s fare. They said little, comprehended less. 
The shine of silver made their eyes glisten, but they could 
give nothing in return for it. Of the boats, there was 
not one left ; not the craziest craft that ever was hauled 
high upon a beach to be broken up into firewood ; nor of 
the boys did one remain of years enough to handle a rope 
or hold a tiller. Here, on this barren shore, there was no 
help ; the great freedom of the sea stretched there as 
though in so much mockery; it would yield nothing — save 
a grave. 

He stood on the narrow strip of yellow sand, with the 
ripple of the high-tide rolling upward and over his feet, 
and looked over the sweet, fresh, tumultuous vastness of 
the waters as men, when camels and mules, and even the 
hardy sons of the soil, have perished one by one in their 
rear, look over the stretch of the desert where no aid is to 
be called, no change can come, except the aid and the 
change of the death that shall leave their flesh to the vul- 
ture, their bones to the bleach of the noon. 

All he had done had been in vain. 

Reaching the sea, they were as far from liberty as when 
the monastery’s doors had closed them in ; unless some 
vessel could be chartered to bear westward before the day 
should be at its meridian, they must turn back, and share 
the wolf’s lair, the hare’s terror, the stag’s life of torture, 
when on every breeze may come the note of chase, when 
every curling moss and broken leaf may bear a mark to 
bring the hunters down. An intense agony came on him 
as his eyes looked blindly out at the gray waste, with the 
sun’s first rays reflected in a broad crimson trail across its 
gloom. The desire of his heart was come to him, and 
with it had come also to him an exceeding bitterness pass- 
ing any that his life had known. That which he had cov- 
eted with so passionate a longing was granted him, and it 
brought with it a terrible penalty. The weight of a sickly 
dread, never before then known to the fearlessness of his 
nature, oppressed him ; a dread that had its root less in 


“serpent’s voice less subtle than her kiss.” 469 

her physical danger than in the darkness that shrouded all 
knowledge of her real fate, all knowledge of her past and 
of her future. 

And even for her mere bodily peril, her peril from the 
chains and the cells of the government, he could do no- 
thing ; he could defend her to his last breath with such 
strength as one man could bring against thousands — that 
was all. There was not a sail in sight, as far as his eyes 
could reach over the water line ; it might be two or three 
nights more yet, as the women told him, before the fishing- 
boats would come in ; to leave her for the length of time 
needful to traverse the coast in search of some other sea- 
side hamlet was impossible ; he saw no course but tore- 
trace his steps to her, and leave the choice of iheir retreat 
with her. These people were miserably poor, and would 
do what was asked of them for the sake of the glitter of 
gold; they were bold, too, and willing to offer such shel- 
ter as their miserable cabins could ; at the worst, it was 
possible that they might rest undiscovered under the 
refuge of these louely rocks until such time as the fishiag 
fleet, returning, should give them means to sail westward, 
or send a vessel with orders to the yacht. 

He stood there some moments, looking seaward from 
the beach, his head sunk, his thoughts very weary ; he 
was condemned to the torture of inaction, the deadliest 
trial that can be fastened on high courage and on eager 
energies ; he turned swiftly as he heard steps lightly pass- 
ing along the pile of rough loose stones that made a sort 
of stairway from the high ground, down between two steep 
and leaning sides of rock; he looked up in anxious hope 
of welcoming some boatman who could help him to a ves- 
sel ; as he did so, the morning sun, shining from the east, 
that faced him as he turned, fell full upon his head and 
throat, and on his tall athletic limbs, loosely clad in the 
linen folds of the fishing-dress. Standing thus, catching 
the brightest glisten of the morning beams, the barcarolo 
dress served little to disguise him, and through the mist- 
wreaths that still hovered round all the upper border of 
the shore, his eyes, ere escape or avoidance was possible, 
met those of the man above upon the broken tiers of cliff. 

They were the keen blue serene eyes of Victor Vane. 

40 


ID ALIA. 


470 

For a moment they looked in silence at each other, met 
thus, face to face, in the coolness of the young day, in the 
solitude of the unfrequented shore. On the one side 
amazement was sincere ; on the other, it was to perfection 
counterfeited. Then, with an easy supple grace, the man, 
in whom Erceldoune’s instinct felt a foe, swung himself 
downward from ledge to ledge, and dropped upon the 
sands beside him, with the common courtesies of a care- 
lessly astonished and complimentary greeting. 

“I came to bathe ; I am staying at a villeggiatura not 
far from this,” he said, as his words of welcome closed. 
“ It is a wild shore here, and unutterably lonely. You are 
yachting, I suppose ?” 

“No.” 

Erceldoune thought nothing of what was asked him, of 
what he answered ; he thought of her alone. This man 
was her friend, her guest, her associate ; could he be 
trusted with her secret ? could he be trusted to assist her 
flight ? And, if not trusted with it, could he be held back 
from the knowledge of it? 

“Not yachting?” pursued Yane, carelessly still. “I 
thought that fisher-costume was surely a sailor’s dress. 
May I ask what brings you, then, to this world-forgotten 
nook ?” 

“ I came to get a boat, and a boat’s crew if I could.” 

“ Ah ! you have lost your way ? There is a dangerous 
landslip hard by ” 

Erceldoune crushed his heel down into the wet loose 
sand ; a gesture that was not lost on his companion. 

“ I know the coast well. I merely need a boat — of what 
kind matters little. Can you help me ?” 

“ I grieve to say no. My friends’ residence is some way 
from here; and, besides, they have not even a pleasure 
skiff; they care nothing for the water. But you would not 
put out to the open sea in a mere boat ?” 

“Why so ?” 

“ Why ! Because I fancy no man would who was not 
weary of his life, or ” 

“ I am not weary of mine.” 

“ Pardon me, 1 was going to end my sentence with — or 
one whose life was menaced on the land.” 

lie spoke the last words gravely, gently, meaningly, 


“ serpent’s voice less subtle than iier kiss.” 4T1 

with an emphasis that left no doubt of their personal ap- 
plication. Erceldoune’s forehead flushed with a hot dark 
rush of blood; a tempestuous shadow came in his eyes; he 
turned abruptly. 

“^Explain that phrase ?” 

“ Nay ; translate it yourself, if you will.” 

“Yot I. I am in no mood for enigmas, and have no 
time for them. You had your meaning ; out with it !” 

He spoke between his clinched teeth ; a fiery misery 
possessed him, and a great longing to wring the truth out 
of this man who cross-questioned him, if he wrung it by 
force with a hand on his throat and a heel on his chest. 

Victor Vane looked him steadily in the eyes; a serious, 
compassionate, candid gaze that silently rebuked his pas- 
sions and his instinct of antagonism. 

“ I am sorry you trust me so little,” he said, briefly. 

Ornamented protests would have forewarned and fore- 
armed his listener, whom the simplicity and manliness of 
the reply put off his guard; they made the loyal, generous 
nature that they dealt with repent as of some craven sin of 
false suspicion ; rebuke itself, as for some ignominy of cow- 
ardly injustice. Moreover, Erceldoune saw that he knew 
much — how much it was best to learn at once, let the learn- 
ing cost what it should. 

“ He has eaten at her board ; he has enrolled himself her 
friend ; he cannot turn traitor to her ; he cannot play false 
to a woman 1” his thoughts ran swiftly, in the tumult of a 
thousand emotions. It seemed to him so vile a thing, that 
to suspect even his rival of it looked base to him. 

“ Let us waste no words,” he said, rapidly, while he 
stood facing the new-comer with the challenge of his gal- 
lant eyes testing the truth of those which met them. “ Time 
is life to me, and more than life ! You guess rightly so 
far. Answer me two things. What do you know ? — and 
why should you be trusted?” 

“The latter question, I imagine, one gentleman should 
scarcely put to another !” 

“ That may be. I am in no temper for these subtleties. 
I know nothing of you except through rumor. Such ru- 
mor would not incline me to place confidence in you. You 
used strange language ; you seem aware of my present 
peril. Simply, say what it is you know.” 


472 


ID ALIA • 


Victor Vane, with a dignity that had in it the compas- 
sionate forbearance of one who respects and pities another 
whose insolence he can afford to pass over and extenuate, 
seated himself on the lowest stair of rock, and answered, 
without hesitation, in a grave and regretful accent : 

‘ “ Sir, I forgive your innuendo on myself, since the ex- 
tremity of your peril may serve to excuse it, and I believe 
that this peril has fallen on you through a rashly noble and 
generous action. We have met here singularly enough. 
I do not know — positively — anything of your actions or 
position ; but I should be half a fool did I not divine much 
of both. Briefly, we are both acquainted with a fair revo- 
lutionist, who has been made a prisoner of the royal ex- 
ecutive. I heard, late last night, that she had been res- 
cued from her captivity — rescued by a man in a fisher 
dress, who displayed the most reckless chivalry in her de- 
fense, and even implicated himself so deeply as to use vio- 
lence to Giulio Villaflor, whereby Monsignore lies now in 
danger at his Cistercian monastery. I heard this ; such 
news soon spreads, specially to Court and Church ; and I 
heard also that both soldiers and sbirri are on the track of 
the fugitives, who are known to have made their way sea- 
ward. Now can you wonder that it needs no great exer- 
cise of intelligence to recognize in you the barcarolo who 
despoiled Church and State of their captive, and to con- 
clude that the vessel you stand in need of is to be employed 
in the service of Miladi Idalia, for whom, living or dead, 
both Church and State would give as weighty a reward as 
the full coffers of the one and the lean treasures of the 
other could afford to yield ? Scant penetration is requisite 
for such a discovery ; every sailor on the coast will make 
it with me in a few hours’ time. It is not a little thing to 
free a political prisoner, and to leave a mighty prelate half 
dead among his own monks.” 

He spoke perfectly quietly, his eyes, with an unusual 
melancholy, looking straight and calm into the eyes of the 
man before him ; — eyes that said without words, “ You 
see — she and you are in my power. One word from me, 
and both are lost !” 

Erceldoune gazed at him, answering nothing ; his chest 
and sides heaved like those of some magnificent forest ani* 


“serpent's voice less subtle than nER kiss. ** 473 

raal caught in the toils of the trapper. lie cared nothing 
for his own life; he would have sold it dearly, content 

enough, if he died worthily; but she For her he had 

no strength ; for her he had no courage ; for her he could 
sue what he would never for himself have sought; for her 
the grave was horrible to him, and had its sickliest terror. 

To parry facts with lies, to turn aside discovery with 
subtle feints, was not in him ; to deny that which he knew 
to be a truth never even passed his thoughts. This was 
another calamity, another danger — the darkest, perhaps, 
that could have come on them ; but his instinct was to 
brave and meet it, not to slink from it under a poltroon’s 
mask of falsehood. He went with a single step close up 
to his companion’s side, and stood above him. 

“ Grant your conclusions right — what then ?” 

“That is rather for you to answer. Your future is a 
very hazardous one.” 

“ I did not speak of my future, but of your course. 
What will it bo ?” 

“ Do you insinuate that I should betray you ?” 

“ I do not insinuate ; I ask. If the world may be be- 
lieved, you have not been always uoted for your fealty.” 

“ Coarse language, and not overwise ■” 

“ I cannot stop to refine, nor yet, perhaps, to reason. 
Tell me how I am to deal with you. As friend or foe ?” 

“ Sir, that is scarcely the way to learn. Diplomacy 
would not dictate such rough and ready questions.” 

“Possibly. But I am no diplomatist.” 

“I imagine not. No one would suspect you of it.” 

“ Spare your satire. Give me a plain answer.” 

“ Not a popular thing, commonly.” 

Erceldoune shook with rage. This play of words was 
to him in his extremity as the tickle of the whip’s light lash 
is to the caged tiger in its wrath. He flung himself away 
with an unconscious violence. 

“Do your worst, if you choose to do it. Go and turn 
traitor against the woman at whose table you sat, and un- 
der whose roof you were welcome ! Adventurers fitly end 
in renegades.” 

As he turned his back on the other, and moved across 
the sand to retrace his steps to her, Vane rose and silently 
40 * 


IDALIA. 


4*?4 

followed hinc, and touched his arm with the slight velvety 
touch of a woman. 

“Wait. You mistake. ” 

Erceldoune paused, and looked him full in the face. 

“ Show my error, and I will confess it.” 

Yane smiled a little, in compassion. This nature, so 
warm, so bold, so frank, so free from every suspicion, so 
willing to avoid every injustice, seemed to him so pitiable 
in its simplicity; its naked strength, that could so easily 
be pierced ; its unselfish impulses, that could so easily be 
duped ; its creed of truth, that was followed so blindly and 
so recklessly ! 

“ You wrong me,” he said, with that tranquil dignity 
which had again replaced the ironic frivolity of his usual 
manner — “ wrong me greatly. Think but a moment, and 
you will yourself see how. The cause for which Madame 
de Yassalis has been arraigned is mine ; would it be likely 
that I should find favor with Court or Church, even were 
I base enough to seek it ? She is the life, the soul, the 
inspiration, often the treasury, of our projects, the Manon 
Roland of our Girondists ; ^s it not palpable that what 
strikes at her must strike at us ? Besides, leaving every 
such reason aside, can you believe that, as a guest, I 
should harm my hostess ; as a man, betray a woman ? 
Rather do me some measure of justice. Believe, at least, 
that I can have some admiration of your fearless chivalry, 
some sympathy for your generous daring ; quixotic I may 
deem it, but reverence it I must.” 

Erceldoune heard him, swayed against his judgment, in- 
fiuonced against his instincts. The tone of the appeal 
touched that knightly temper of trust and of liberality 
that was always dominant in him ; he hated this man, but 
to let his hate prejudice him to injustice seemed very vile 
in his sight ; he thought that he owed a wider measure of 
justice, a more generous extension of tolerance, to an 
enemy than a friend ; where his impulses set him against, 
there he felt that his honor should more closely strive for 
fairness to a foe. A code that had in its results, per- 
chance, a folly unutterable, yet had in its root a magna- 
nimity and a majesty scarce less great, and such as men 
would do well to strive after in giving judgment 


“SERPENT’S VOICE LESS SUBTLE TUAN HER KISS ’ 475 

“ Trusted, even a scoundrel will quit his baseness. And — 
if he has ever loved her, he can hardly be a traitor to 
her,” — his thoughts ran as he paused there, and heard the 
measured sweetness of his rival’s voice. And on those 
thoughts he spoke, making the error that costs so many 
dear — the error of gauging another character by the meas« 
ure of his own. 

“If I wronged you, I ask your pardon. Your jests fell 
sharply on a heart so sore as mine. You have our lives 
in your power ; for her sake, hold them sacredly. All the 
help you can give us is silence. I thank you for your 
promise of that. Farewell ! And forget my words if 
they did you an injury. They were spoken in passion and 
haste.” 

For the moment the words touched his hearer ; awoke 
something of shame, something of admiration, something 
of compassion, that had no scorn in it, but a dim instinct 
of honor for the noble madness that believed in him, for 
this self-rebuke that was spoken so generously, content to 
take blame rather than to hold to an unjustified suspicion. 
All the cruelty of jealousy, all the pitilessness of hatred, all 
the unmerciful heartlessness of craft, were in him against 
the man whom he instinctively knew that the woman he 
coveted loved. Yet they were for an instant stilled under 
the vague emotion that woke in him — that emotion of in- 
voluntary homage which even the shallowest and the basest 
natures will at times yield reluctantly to the greatness of a 
brave sincerity. But it was very fleeting with him ; too 
fleeting to change the hard set purpose that had possessed 
him from the moment when his knowledge of his rival’s 
temper had made him at once divine who had been the de- 
liverer of their mistress, and had sent him seaward to trust 
to hazard for the accident that should bring him across 
the fugitives’ path. 

He stretched his hand out. 

“That was very nobly said.” And in those words he 
spoke but what he truly thought. “Sir Fulke, we may 
surely be friends ?” 

Erceldoune looked steadily at him, and did not take his 
hand. 

“Pardon me — my friendships are few, and I add to them 


476 


IDALIA. 


rarely. Aid her , and no friend shall be so close to me as 
you.” 

“ You speak strongly Is Madame de Yassalis so dear 
to you, then ?” 

“Judge by the risk I have run for her.” 

“ True! You are not the first ” 

“ The first for what ?” 

“Weil — the first who thought his life will last for her. 
And — forgive me the question, I have known her so long 
— what does she say to you for it ?” 

“ I fail to apprehend you.” 

“You do ? I mean, what reward does that fairest and 
most fatal of sorceresses promise you if ever you escape 
the dangers you have incurred for the sake of her eloquent 
eyes ?” 

He saw Erceldoune’s grasp tighten on the hilt of the 
weapon thrust in his sash, and his teeth close on his lips 
under his beard. 

“ Her insults are mine,” he said, curtly. “ By what right 
do you use such a tone ?” 

“ By what right do you constitute yourself her champion 7 
It will be a thankless office.” 

“By the right of a man to defend his wife’s honor.” 

In the deep shadow of the overhanging cliff he did not 
see the ashen color to which the fairness of his listener’s 
face faded; in the tumult of his own thoughts and passions 
he did not hear the quick, sharp catch of his companion’s 
breath. The tranquil gaze bent on him lightened an in- 
stant with a tiger’s hunger to kill ; the look soon passed ; 
Yane laughed a little, very softly, very slightly. 

“Ah ! Miladi must think her jeopardy very imminent. 
She never proffered so heavy a bribe before.” 

Erceldoune’s hands fell on his shoulders, swaying him 
heavily to and fro. 

“What do you dare to mean by that?” 

“ Simply what 1 say. If she bribe so high, she must 
think her peril equal.” 

“ Why ? Am I so loathsome ?” 

“Certainly not. You are a magnificent man; just the 
man for a lover. But marriage ” 

“ Finish your sentence. Marriage ” 


“SERPENT'S VOICE LESS SUBTLE THAN HER KISS.” 477 

“ May be a word on her lips, but will never be a chain 
upon her liberties. ” 

“ Ton dare to mean ” 

“ Release me, and I will tell you what I mean. I do 
not speak for any threats of force.” 

Erceldoune slowly let go his hold, and stood before him 
with the morning sun-gleam on his face that was stormily 
flushed, and wore the look on it that comes in a dog’s 
steady gaze when a leash holds him back from his antago- 
nist. His rival’s eyes met his serenely ; in the calm trans- 
parent depths there was an unspoken pity that made his 
blood glow like lava. 

“In a word — I mean this. She has bought you with 
syren words ; do you dream how many she has bought like- 
wise before you, and — destroyed ?” 

“I know that no man living shall insult her name to me 
unpunished.” 

“Ah ! you will stop my lips with a blow ? You can, if 
you choose ; you have ten times my strength ; but honor- 
able women do not need such tragical defense. And, let 
me ask you one thing only before you refuse to hear me.” 

“Ask it.” 

“ Who fired at you in the Carpathians ?” 

In the warm glow of the summer dawn Erceldoune’s 
limbs grew chilly with a sudden sickly cold. He did not 
answer. He divined the drift of the inquiry; and, know- 
ing what he now knew of her recognition of his assassin, 
he could not bring his voice to speak of it. 

“ You do not know ! You should do so. Did you ever 
ask this woman who is to be your wife ?” 

His chest heaved heavily with hard -drawn breaths ; his 
memories were with the evening just passed by, when the 
sunset had shed its ruddy hues on the face of the slumber- 
ing Greek, and she had bid him spare that worthless life 
with a passionate force of supplication to which she had 
never stooped when her own existence had been in jeopardy. 
But he was too loyal to her for his answer not to rise hot 
and instant to his lips. 

“Ask her ? Would I do her so much outrage ?” 

“ Yet no one could tell you so well.” 

“What ! you are vile enough to say 


v 


4YS 


IDALIA. 


“The villainy is not mine! T say that the Countess 
Vassalis can tell you better who is the man that sought to 
take your life than can any one else in Europe.” 

Erceldoune heard in silence ; he felt giddy, blind, heart- 
sick ; his knowledge of her association with the Greek was 
lying like a dead weight on the indignant scorn with which 
he would, without it, have flung back the insult offered 
her; the remembrance was upon him of her intercession 
that had screened the criminal from justice, of her conjura- 
tion that had interposed between the guilty and his retri- 
bution, of her agony of shame and of terror that had broken 
and bent her haughty nature like a reed. 

“You lie,” he said, savagely, unwitting what he did say, 
seeking only to defend her at all hazards. “ She never 
knew ; — he is her foe not less than mine.” 

“Ah ! she has spoken of him, then V 1 

“ What if she have ?” 

“Nothing. Only she is still less scrupulous thaa I im- 
agined. She said he was her foe, did she ? What other 
things did she say of him ?” 

Erceldoune’s hand seized him by the linen of his vest, 
and shook him as a strong grasp will shake the slender 
stem of a larch-tree. His mouth was parched ; his words 
came slowly and incoherently : 

“ You will make a brute of me 1 You have some hellish 
meaning hidden — speak it out, if you have a man’s heart 
in you. What would you dare bring against her V 1 

Victor Vane freed himself with difficulty, and moved 
slightly aside; but there was no anger in the serenity of 
his voice, only some pity and much patience. 

“I have nothing hidden ; if you hear me, you will know 
as much as I know. 1 see your error ; many have made 
it. You have thought in such divinity of form divinity of 
soul must dwell. Scores have made your mistake, and died 
for it — as you may before the game is out. Miladi has 
had many lovers, and — dead men tell no tales.” 

He paused ; his rival’s hand was on his mouth, and the 
steel tube of a pistol was pressed against his forehead. 

“Another syllable like that, and, by Heaven 1 I will 
Bhoot you with the lie on your lips.” 

Courage had never been lacking in him ; his eyes looked 


“serpent’s voice less subtle than her kiss.” 479 

up none the less tranquilly into the dark, flushed, Laggard 
face above him, though the cold ring of the weapon pressed 
its mark on his skin. 

“ Of course you can if you choose. I am unarmed. 
You will oblige your sovereign mistress, too. I know 
many of her secrets.” 

Erceldoune’s arm fell to his side ; he shivered through 
all his frame ; he could not use violence to a man without 
the power to return it ; he could not force to silence words 
which, if he refused to hear them, he would seem to know 
were true in all their shame. He dropped the pistol down 
on the sands between them, and crossed his arms on his 
chest. 

“ Say your worst. Oar reckoning shall come later.” 

“ Well, my worst is — the truth. You love this woman; 
but you are not in her confidence ; you never will be.” 

He saw a quiver of pain break the wrath on his listen- 
er’s face, and he saw that the bolt had struck home. 

“ You believe everything she tells you ? I never found 
the man who did not credit what she chose to make him. 
You worship her, but you worship your own ideal in her. 
I have seen scores do that. I cfoubt if a man can look 
long at her, and see clearly, unless he has known her well, 
and comes forewarned to her — as I came. Well, you have 
thought her a mistress for ‘ Shakspeare’s self;’ you have 
seen her in great dangers ; you have imagined her foully 
wronged ; you have cast away all your heart on her, and 
now are casting your life away after it. And you do all 
this without ever having asked yourself and the world what 
a woman must be who, titled, is yet out of society; who, 
young, yet recklessly defies all custom; who, rich, can 
summon round her none but men, and those men adven- 
turers or conspirators ; who shelters your assassin in her 
Turkish gardens, yet affects all ignorance of his identity 
or vicinage ; and who, driven at last to speak of him, tolls 
you he is her foe, yet omits altogether to explain why, 
if so, she has so long shielded him from your discovery 
and the law’s justice. You love, and therefore yon are 
blind. Yet is it possible that even the blindness of pas- 
sion can be so utterly dark that, you have never remem 
bered all these things ?” 


480 


IDALIA. 


The black blood gathered in his listener’s face ; he kept 
his passions down, because, for her sake, he held it best to 
hear all her calumniator would bring against her, but they 
well-nigh mastered him, rising the darker and the stronger 
for the keen pang of truth that every shaft of the abhorred 
words stung him with — truth that she had herself placed 
it beyond his power to refute. 

“ Go on,” he said, in his teeth. “ You called yourself 
her friend, I think ?” 

The rebuke was bitter, yet it did not move the man it 
lashed. 

“ Scarcely so much,” he returned, quietly. “ Her ac- 
quaintance — indeed, her associate in not a few political 
matters — but scarcely her friend. Miladi’s friendships are 
too perilous. Look you ; I had a friend once, an Austrian, 
though I bear Austria no love. We had been lads to- 
gether in Yenetia, and the war-lusts failed to divide us. I 
think he was the brightest and the bravest nature I have 
ever known. Well, in an evil hour he fell, as you have 
done, under the eyes of Idalia. He had a military secret 
in his keeping ; a secret, granted, that was of import to 
Italy, so perhaps you will deem what she did was justified 
for Italy’s sake. I might have done, had I not known him 
from his boyhood ; I might have done ; — who touches 
politics fast grows a knave. Simply, she made him wor- 
ship her, as she makes you ; sunned him in her smiles, leant 
her lips on his, let him lie in Eden for awhile, till sense and 
iudgment were both gone — as yours are gone. Theu, while 
she promised him her beauty as its price, she stole his se- 
cret from him — bought it with those caresses you believe 
are only yours — and, when his honor was yielded up to her, 
turned him adrift with a laugh at his weakness. Ah ! that 
is Miladi ! So — I saw him shot one sunny summer dawn; 
with the balls in his throat, fired by a volley of his own 
cuirassiers. Politically, we owed her much ; personally, I 
never in my soul could trust the woman who betrayed Hugo.” 

Erceldoune shook through all his limbs ; the spasm not 
alone of rage, but of a more cruel emotion. The tale had 
too close a likeness with her own self-accusing confession, 
her own keenness of remorse, not to bear a terrible burden 
of possibility with it — a hideous surface of truth which 


“serpent’s voice less subtle than her kiss.” 481 


made it impossible it should be cast away as calumny. Yet 
through the dizzy misery that came upon him with the 
words he heard he grasped one thought still foremost of 
nil — to defend her, and to cast back every aspersion thrown 
on her, as though no doubt could ever rest with him, as 
though she had never bade him believe the worst of her 
that the world could tell. 

“ Is that all you stayed me to tell ?” he said, briefly. “ It 
was not worth* your while. I have no heed for libels.’’ 

“ It is not all. I kuow well that my words are wasted, 
and that you think me a slanderer for them : that is a 
matter of course. Hugo thought me the same when I told 
him what the tenderness of his imperial mistress would 
prove worth. I never knew any man saved whom her 
smile once had doomed. I will not strain your patience 
longer ; let us keep close to one fact — the attempt upon 
your life. You deny the association of Idalia with that 
crime ?” 

“ I deny it — utterly.” 

His voice had a harsh vibration in it like the tone of one 
who speaks under unbearable physical suffering. He de- 
nied it in her name ; but while he did so there ate like fire 
into him the remembrance of that shame, that horror, that 
remorse, that passion, with which she had looked upon the 
Greek, and held him from his vengeance. With his last 
breath he would have declared her guiltless ; with his last 
thought held her so ; yet the shadow of guilt fell on her, 
and he could not drive from her the taint and the tarnish 
of its reproach. 

“ You do ? She is indebted for your chivalry,” resumed 
the slow, sweet voice of his companion. “I see how little 
you must ever have heard of the finest mistress of intrigues 
that Europe holds, to yield it so unhesitatingly. Now 
bear .with me a moment while I ask you why you are so 
certain that she had no share in the attack made on 
you?” 

“Ask yourself. You know her.” 

“And you mean that none who do can doubt her being 
the proudest and the purest, as well as the fairest among 
women? Ah but then I have passed by that stage; 1 
2 F 41 


482 


ID ALIA. 


knew her by repute long before I ever saw her face. Your 
reasons then, for thinking her both innocent and ignorant 
of your attempted assassination are these: that she was on 
the spot at the time you were shot down; that she saved 
your life, and concealed the action even from yourself, 
allowing it to be believed that Moldavian herdsmen res- 
cued you; that you chased the leader of the band as far as 
the gardens of her villa at Constantinople, and there lost 
sight of him, though the walls of the gardens were so dis- 
posed that he could only have been concealed within them, 
if not in the house itself ; that she invited you to spend 
many hours alone with her in her Eastern hermitage, and 
so spent them that she found little difficulty in making you 
believe her all she would; that she then sought to throw 
you off by leaving you abruptly without any clew to her 
movements; and that when you persisted, against her 
wish, in seeking her, you found her, first the associate, and 
a little later the fellow-prisoner with the men of that very 
party of extreme liberalists to whom you have always at- 
tributed the murderous onslaught made on you. These 
are your reasons for holding her innocent of all treason to 
you ; they would not be very weighty evidences in law and 
in logic.” 

As the chain of circumstances uncoiled link by link in 
the terse, unadorned words, it seemed to tighten in bands 
of iron about the heart of the man who trusted not less 
than he loved her. His face changed terribly as all the 
force of meaning and of circumstance arrayed itself against 
her, and the vague doubts, that he had strangled in their 
birth as blasphemies against her, stood out in unveiled 
language. A dogged, savage, sullen darkness lowered on 
his features ; it had never been on them before then ; it 
was a ferocity wholly akin to his nature, hardened and 
embittered by the knowledge of his own powerlessness to 
repel or to refute the evidence arraigned. They were but 
facts which were quoted — facts not even distorted in the 
telling ; the inference drawn from them was the inevitable 
one, however his loyalty to her disowned it. He felt driven 
to bay; he was fettered to inaction by the knowledge that 
on him alone her safety hung ; he was weighted to silence 
by the memories which thronged on him of her own acts 


“ serpent’s voice less subtle than heb kiss.” 483 


and words ; of that poignant remorse which had sunk so 
deeply into her nature, of that self-condemnation which had 
so unsparingly condemned her. Yet amid all he nevei 
hesitated in her defense, and his eyes fastened on her ac- 
cuser with a steady unyielding gaze. 

“ I am no casuist and no rhetorician,” he said, in his 
teeth. “You are both. Once for all — no more words. 
If you have been her friend, you are a traitor ; if you have 
been her foe, you are a slanderer. Either way, one word 
more, and I will choke you like a dog.” 

“An unworthy and a coarse threat. What falsehood 
have I told you yet ? I named but facts.” 

“Your outline might be fact. It was your color was 
the lie.” 

“ I think not. I can prove to you that your mistress 
was in the secret of your assassins.” 

“And your motive in that?” 

The lion like eyes of Erceldoune literally blazed their 
fire into those that met them with unchanged serenity. 
There were volumes in the three words; all of distrust, 
disbelief, hatred, and scorn that his heart held for the one 
who had turned counselor to him. Their sting pierced 
deep ; but the wound of it was covered. 

“ My motive is this. A party with which I was to a 
great extent associated, yet from whose measures I very 
often dissented, implicated me by their extreme opinions 
in many courses that I utterly disapproved, and implicated 
my name still oftener unknown to me. I am entirely 
against all violence and all fraud — not from virtue — I do 
not affect virtue — but from common sense. Politically, 
much is permissible ” 

“ I am not inclined to hear your creed. I make no 
doubt that it is an elastic one ! Your motive ?” 

“ You pass it in your haste. I endeavor to explain it. 
I became entangled in earliest youth with men whose asso- 
ciation has been the greatest injury of ray career. I have 
never been able wholly to free myself from their influence, 
but I have long ceased to countenance their more unscru- 
pulous intrigues — not from virtue, I distinctly say, from 
policy. It is a lack of sagacity that produces all crimes; 
nothing else; except an excess of animalism, which pro- 


484 


ID ALIA. 


duces the same results, because it amounts to the same 
thing. ” 

“ Spare your ethics ! Your motive ?” 

“ Springs from the inability of ray late associates to dis- 
cern the kinship of crime and foolishness. When I first 
heard of your robbery, I had my suspicions ; I was baffled 
in my inquiries ; I believed that men with whom my name 
was connected were concerned in it, but they feared that I 
should learn their complicity, and for some time succeeded 
in concealing it. Recently — indeed, the day before the affair 
of Antina — I found my suspicions right. 1 am ashamed 
to say that I have traced that melodramatic villainy to those 
who call themselves of my party, although I have fully and 
finally broken off all collusion with them. In a word, I 
have felt disgraced that men with whom I have been allied 
should have been capable of such an outrage, and so much 
reparation as can lie in the acknowledgment is of course 
your immediate due. I care little how you revenge your- 
self, so that your vengeance may be the executor of mine 
for the deception passed on me. Moreover, in learning 
the truth of the crime you suffered from, I learnt what you 
have a right to know, since you believe the Countess Yas- 
salis worthy the surrender of your own life, which is prob- 
ably the cost you will pay sooner or later for your loyal 
efforts to save her.” 

Erceldoune breathed fast and heavily; a sickening sense 
of mystery, of treachery, of evil, of half-truths told him 
only that by them he might be led deeper into error, was 
upon him. 

“ Had I twenty lives, she commands them,” he said, 
briefly. “ Say out your meaning — honestly, if you can.” 

“Very simply, then; — the woman to whom you would 
give a score of lives, if you had them, has from first to last 
sheltered your assassin from you, and has counterfeited 
tenderness for you that she might gain an influence strong 
enough to enable her to turn aside your vengeance from 
the only man Idalia Yassalis ever loved.” 

The words were cold, clear, incisive, calm with the tran- 
quillity of unwarped truth. Under them Erceldoune stag- 
gered slightly, like one who reels under a deep knife-thrust; 
his face grew black with a hot rush of blood, his hands fell 


“serpent’s voice less subtle than her kiss.” 485 

once more on his torturer’s shoulders, swaying him dizzily 
to and fro. 

“ Own that you lie, or by ” 

The closing oath rattled hard in his throat ; in the mo- 
ment he could have choked her traducer dead with no more 
thought, no more remorse, than men strangle the adder 
that has destroyed the life they treasure closest. 

Yane, deficient neither in courage nor in supple strength, 
shook himself loose with a rapid movement, and lifting the 
pistol from the sands, held it out with a grave, graceful 
gesture, as though the weapon were a branch of palm. 

“ Take it back, and shoot me dead with it, if you find 
that I tell you untruth.” 

“If!” 

“Yes — ‘if.’ I am no slanderer weaving a legend; no 
gossiper trafficking in cobwebs. I tell you a hard, un- 
glozed, pitiless fact ; there are many such in the history of 
the woman you imagine has so stainless, so martyred, so 
royal a soul ! Take back your weapon, and use it if I play 
you false. You are longing to kill me now — I see that in 
your eyes ; but you are a lion, not a fox, and so you will 
not kill in the dark. Make it day about you, broad noon- 
day, by which you can read the depths of your mistress’s 
heart, and then — if she prove guiltless and I a liar — then 
compensate yourself as you will.” 

Erceldoune answered nothing, but he stretched his hand 
out and grasped the pistol in a silence that had more mean- 
ing than speech ever carried. A dusky reddened light was 
glowing in the darkness of his eyes — the light that glows 
in a dog’s when the longing to seize and rend is rousing in 
it ; his blood felt like fire ; the dawn seemed to grow like 
night ; the corrosion of a jealous hate was in him, and 
in its evil all other memories were drowned, all desires 
quenched, all loyalty loosened. 

The other stretched his arm out and touched him as he 
turned and strode over the wet stone-strewn beach. 

“ Wait. Where do you go ?” 

“ I go to ‘make it daylight,’ as you say — daylight strong 
enough to unbare your villainy.” 

“ But first you must hear ” 

“ I have heard too much.” 

41 * 


486 


IDALIA. 


“ Stop an instant. Remember, I have known the story 
of Idalia as you will never know it.” 

“ The more you know, the more honor should bind you 
into silence.” 

“ Madman ! When I tell you ” 

“ Mad I may be. Rather that than a traitor.” 

“ It is a traitress of whom we speak.” 

Erceldoune’s eyes flashed a strange glance into his ; it 
was scorching as fire, yet it had in it a terrible appeal. 

“Take care what you do,” he muttered. “You will 
make me kill you.” 

“ No. But I will make you prove my words truth or 
slander.” 

“ I go to do it.” 

“You think you do; you do not. You go to hear a 
few soft words from lips that have duped the subtlest in- 
triguers in Europe, and to believe every phrase that they 
breathe with a kiss upon yours, as though it were witnessed 
by angels ! I tell you that my honor shall not rest upon 
so wayward and so frail a thing as her caprice of inven- 
tion.” 

“And I tell you that her honor shall not rest upon the 
tongues of traitors. You have dared to say she shielded 
my assassin ” 

“ I say more ; — I say she loved him. No ! Take your 
hand off; you can seek my life later on; at present you 
must save your own, if you do not want a Bourbon bullet 
through your lungs for this woman who has fooled you, 
as she fools us all. There is one man, one only, that 
your mistress ever loved. She has wearied of him now, 
found him a thorn in her side, learned to hate him as such 
women can hate, drawn all the fragrance from her rose, and 
thrown the old withered leaves away — only the leaves are 
poisoned, and they cling, they cling ! One man she loved, 
and she lavished her gold on him, and she reared her am- 
bitions for him, and she was half his slave and half his sov- 
ereign, while she was for all the world beside that beauti- 
ful, cruel, wanton, pitiless, divine, and devilisn sorceress 
that we know. She has had many lovers, but she duped 
them all. This man she never duped. A panther, with a 
velvet eye and a glorious beauty ; a sun-god, with the soul 


“ serpent’s voice less subtle than her kiss.” 48t 

of a fox and the heart of a carron-crow — nothing more. 
But who shall measure the passionate fancies of a woman? 
— and such a woman ? Well, she loved him ; and he was 
your assassin. No way so sure to shield him, as to bring 
you under her dominance ! It may be, it is true, that while 
fooling you for his sake, you dethroned him, and she grew 
in earnest, and it is he who is now to be thrown ad leones . 
It may be ; Miladi has had many such caprices ! That you 
may know I say truth, and not falsehood, go and put but 
two questions to her. Ask her first, who the man is who 
left you for dead in the mountains. Ask her last, what 
the tie is that binds her to the Greek, Conrad Phaulcon.” 

Erceldoune had listened, without a word, without a 
breath, his face with that tempestuous darkness lowered on 
it, and a great horror, a great misery gazing vacantly out 
from his dilated eyes. Yet the loyalty and the faith in 
him were stronger than all tests that wrung them ; he 
struggled to keep his hold upon them, and to keep them 
pure, unsoiled, unswerving, as men may strain to guard 
their honor unwarped, when all the dizzy world about them 
reeks with infamy, and presses them on to crime. 

“ I will ask her,” he said, hoarsely, while his lips were 
white and dry as dust. “Not to prove her purity, but to 
prove your shame.” 

Then, without another syllable, he turned and set his 
face southward, and went by great swift steps, that sank 
into the sea-washed sand, backward to where he had left 
her — backward, with the waste of waters lying silent and 
untroubled by his course, and the sun rising higher from 
over the red wail of rock. Belief in what he had heard 
there was none, even yet, in his heart ; off the brave al- 
legiance of his rash nobility the evil fell, finding no grap- 
pling-place, no resting-lair ; but on him a heavy, breath- 
less, deadly oppression lay, and the first fear that his bold 
life had ever known ran like a current of ice through all 
his veins. The poison of doubt had been breathed on him, 
and its plague-spot widened and deepened, let him rend 
the canker out as he would. 

Once in the agony of his passion he stretched out his 
arms to the vacant air as he went on in his loneliness, as 


488 


IDALIA. 


though ne saw her beauty, and drew it to him, though death 
should come with it. 

“ Oh, my love, my love I” he muttered, unconsciously, in 
the longing of his soul. “What matter what you be, so 
you are mine!” 

It was in the blindness of the senses that he spoke, the 
mere idolatrous desire for the loveliness that to him had 
no likeness upon earth ; the cruel, intoxicated, fiery riot of 
the “love lithe and fierce” that counts no cost to itself or 
to its prey, and that would plunge into an eternity of 
pain to purchase one short hour of its joy. A moment, 
and the nobler passion in him rose; the perfect faith, with- 
out which his one idolatry would be but brutalized aban- 
donment, rebuked him; his head sank, his eyes saw the 
gray glooming sea through a hot rush of tears. 

“ God forgive me so much sin to her as lay in the mere 
thought 1” ho murmured as he went; to think that the lips 
which had lain on his had ever breathed the kisses which 
betray, to think that the heart which had beaten upon his 
had ever throbbed to the warmth of guilty pleasure, seemed 
to him a blasphemy against her that was sin itself. For, 
even though those lips should be his, even though that 
heart should beat for him, if there were past treachery or 
present infidelity in her life, she would be dead to him — 
dead, more cruelly than though the steel had. pierced the 
fairness of her breast, and the golden trail of her hair been 
drawn through the trampled dust of blood-stained streets 

If truth abode not with her, and the fealty of honor, she ' 
was dead to him. 

“ If her eyes shrink from mine, let the seas cover me !” 
he prayed in his soul ; and the length of the shore seemed 
endless to him, and the tawny stretch of the beach seemed 
the burning waste of a desert, and the surf, as it flowed up 
and broke at his feet, seemed to force his steps backward 
and backward, and to bind his limbs as with lead. 


“let it work!” 


489 


CHAPTER XXXI. 

“ LET IT WORK !” 

For many moments Victor Vane stood motionless, fol- 
lowing with his gaze the retreating shadow of the man in 
whom his instinct had from the first foreseen his rival. 
The grave patience, the gentle tranquillity, the subdued re- 
gret his features had worn throughout their interview, 
passed away ; a thousand emotions, a thousand shades of 
thought, of feeling, and of suffering, swept over them ; 
alone there, with no living thing near him save the white 
gulls resting on the curl of the incoming waves, he had no 
need to wear a mask, and he endured as sharp a misery as 
any he had dealt. 

The deadliest pang in it was shame ; the carking, jealous, 
bitter shame that where he had failed another should have 
won ; the knowledge that the love borne her by the man 
who had left him was to the love that he himself had borne 
as the purity and value of purged gold against a pile of 
tinsel. It stilled in something the tortures of jealousy, it 
sated in something the thirst of hatred, to cast — were it 
only in thought — irony, and invective, and scornful calumny 
upon his rival; it was natural to him to despise with all 
the contempt of his fine and subtle intelligence a character 
that its own frankness and loyalty and high courage left 
naked to all poisoned shafts, and that was so rashly liberal 
in faith, so unwisely incapable of falsehood, so blindly and 
wildly careless to how it wrought its own weal and woe. 
Yet the most carking wound of all that now ached in him 
was the latent sense of superiority in the man who had 
supplanted him, who had succeeded where he had been van- 
quished, and whom he had regarded with the cold disdain 
of a flippant wit, as holding all his worth and merit in an 
athlete’s mere physical perfections of thews and sinews. 
Steeled against all such emotion as he was, the greatness 


490 


ID A LI A. 


and the nobleness of Erceldoune’s faith forced themselves 
on him ; they wrung a reverence out of him despite himself, 
and they dealt him a. mortal pain; pain that was in one 
sense vanity-moved, since it would no longer leave him the 
one solace of scorn for his rival, but a pain that sprang 
from, and that moved, a deeper, better thing — a recog- 
nition, tardy and unwilling though it was, of some great- 
ness he had missed in missing truth ; some base and guilty 
cowardice that he had stooped to when once truth had 
passed off from his lips, banished with a scoff as only fit for 
fools. 

Beyond jealousy, beyond hatred, beyond every other feel- 
ing in him as he stood looking southward at the great shaft 
of russet stone that screened the pathway of his rival from 
his sight, there was on him then an intense humiliation. 
Beside the sincerity, the fealty, the self-surrender, the brave 
patience of a generous trust, his own subtleties looked so 
unworthy, his own fine craft so poor ; another could render 
her a love that deemed life itself well lost for her, and he — . 
he was her traitor ! 

There was enough of honor and enough of tenderness 
in him for the contrast to strike into him, hard, sharp, swift 
as steel. This man whom he had contemned with all the 
mockery of his brilliant mind had grown great in his sight 
simply through the ennobling influence of a mighty passion 
and an heroic faith. He still cursed these with Lis lips as 
insanity, as idiotcy, but in his heart he knew their great- 
ness — a greatness that he had by his own choice, his own 
act, put far from him forever. 

Away in the world again he would again cleave to his 
old creeds, and deem the moment womanish weakness ; but 
here in the loneliness of the morning, under the sting of an 
intolerable torment, the man he hated was great in his 
sight, and he himself was base exceedingly. Where he 
stood, with no eyes on him that could read his shame, a 
red flush slowly stole over the wanness of his face ; none 
living could have brought it there, but the scourge of his 
own thoughts did. 

“A traitor I a traitor !” he muttered to those silent seas 
that washed to and fro so wearily at his feet. 

For though he had fallen willingly, the fall seemed to 


“let it WORK I” 


491 


him hideously vile ; as in the gray, cold, unpitying light of 
a dawn that brings him no slumber, the sins and the bur- 
dens that a man counts recklessly and bears lightly in the 
crowds of the daytime and the dissipations of the night 
stand out in their true color, and grow unendurable in his 
sight and his memory. 

But the better instinct too soon perished ; there was 
passion in him, and passion choked conscience ; he could 
not have told whether he most loved or most hated this 
woman, but whichever emotion swayed him furthest, the 
jealousy that he had so often laughed at as a barbarism of 
a bygone age was born of both, and in its fire quenched all 
other things. If it were true that Idalia loved this man 
who so loyally had served her ! — in his own soul he did not 
doubt its truth, and it sufficed to nerve afresh in him every 
impulse of evil. He felt for her that covetous, sensual, 
pitiless growth of mingled envy, admiration, and ambition, 
which, long after all tenderness has perished out of it, will 
retain all its imperious egotism, and all its thirst for 
sweeping destruction of everything preferred before it. An 
acrid bitterness against her for her pride, her power, her 
keen wit, and her fearless intellect, had been blent with the 
earliest hours of his subjugation to her ; and this served 
now to strengthen tenfold the fierce, mute, aching impa- 
tience of misery with which he now mused on the possi- 
bility that this woman, so cold, so merciless, so full of 
mockery for him, had ever stooped her haughty spirit 
down to the weakness she had often played with, and so 
often ridiculed. 

“ Is it possible ! Is it possible ! She — she/” he mut- 
tered, while his delicate lips shook and worked in the an- 
guish which, in a youth, would have been spent in tears. 
“ She — so victorious, so ironic, so chill, so world-worn, so 
magnificent, love for sake of a wanderer’s eagle glances, a 
rough-rider’s lion-graces 1 She ! — a woman who could fill 
a throne, and rule it single-handed. Pshaw 1 she is a 
voluptuary, she is a coquette, she has her caprices — Miladi ! 
And he is handsome as a gladiator. She loves him — oh 
yes — she loves him for six months, six weeks, six days. 
And what price will he pay for the paradise ?” 

The venomous words were murmured to the solitary 


492 


IDALIA, 


shore ; even thus, and alone, it was a cruel solace to him 
to taunt her with those sneers, to soil what he had lost 
forever, to libel what he envied with so unquenchable a 
jealousy. It could not harm her thus to slander her, when 
none but the breaking surf and the fluttering sea-birds 
made answer, but he felt a relief in it, a joy kindred to 
that joy with which he had thought of her in the dungeons 
of the Capuano, when he had sold her into the hands of 
Giulio Yillaflor. 

Moreover, he believed what he said ; partially because 
his suffering made him cling to whatsoever could lessen it, 
partially because the character of Idalia had escaped him 
in many of its hues, keen and varied as were the worldly 
experiences by whose light he had first set himself to read 
it. He had known of her through a thousand tongues ere 
ever he had looked upon her face ; the poison-mists 
breathed from their distortions had never wholly faded 
from before her in his sight. Such a woman needs a mind 
singularly truthful and singularly liberal to understand her 
aright. Truth he had not in him, and to all talent save 
his own he was illiberal ; thus he had failed in following 
the complex meanings of her life and of her thoughts He 
had uttered but what he held himself when he had said 
that 


beautiful she is, 

The serpent’s voice less subtle than her kiss, 

The snake but vanquished dust ; and she will draw 
Another host from heaven to break heaven’s law. 

But he had withheld what was not less true, that it was 
because she had this sin of merciless destruction in her, this 
serpent skill of tempting, this guilty power over the fates 
and souls of men, that he had first been fascinated to her 
dominion, and first seen in her a mistress by whom and 
with whom he could reach all to which his restless and in- 
satiable ambitions aspired, and aspired in vain. 

“ Will he believe ?” he wondered, as fc his eyes vacantly 
rested on the sands where the tide was filling the footprints 
of his rival. “ Not he. What man would believe the 
witnessing voices of the whole world if she once whispered 
them false ?. And she pays him, too, with love- words, with 


“LET IT WORK!” 


493 


the sweetness of her lips, with the touch of hair on his 
cheek ; — ah, God !” 

He quivered from head to foot as the cry escaped him'* 
he could have thrown himself on the sands and bidden the 
sea surge up and cover him, when he thought of that caress 
which already had been the reward of the man who had 
succored her. And he — he who betrayed her, what had he 
won by the treachery ? 

“Revenge at least,” he thought; and as he thought so 
his head sank, his limbs grew rigid, his chest rose and 
fell with a single voiceless sob. He only remembered that 
revenge was valueless, since revenge could not bring him 
the lips that he longed for, the beauty that he desired as 
the ice-bound earth desires summer. 

Valueless? — yet not so. It could not give her to him, 
but it could withhold her from any other. 

A young, shy, gentle, little sea-bird, whose wings as yet 
could scarce bear it, rose at his feet as he mused, and flut- 
tered a hand’s breadth, and then trembled and fell, pant- 
ing and glancing up with its bright dove-like, brown eye. 
He took it savagely and wrung the slender, snowy throat, 
and flung it out on to the crest of a breaker — dead. He 
had never before been cruel to birds or beasts ; such fierce 
and wanton slaughter was not natural to him, but in this 
moment it had a horrible pleasure in its brutality. He 
had subdued all his impulses of hate so long, it sated them, 
if ever so slightly, to wreak them on that innocent bird. 
He had §,een the dying eyes glaze and fill with misty fear 
with a gladness he would have believed impossible; he 
wanted to see hers fade out thus; to stand by and see 
them fade with just that look of terror and of helpless- 
ness; — eyes that had given such smiling scorn to him, 
such passionate eloquence to others. He watched the 
tumbled heap of white ruffled plumage washed in and out 
by the advancing and retreating sea. 

“I can destroy her as easily as I killed that bird,” he 
thought, and the worst instincts of his nature had their 
sway once more, as his mouth laughed with his slight, soft 
smile. “Barbaric! Terribly barbaric!” he murmured. 
•‘And I was so wise in my diplomacy with him; I told 
42 


494 


ID ALIA, 


him only truth. Talleyrand is right. Truth is so safe and 
so sure 1” 

Then leaving the dead bird floating on the water’s play, 
he went whither he came, 

“Monsignore will rally enough to sign an order,” he 
mused. “A half-score soldiers, and they will be netted. 
Ah 1 his only mistress will be the galley-oar, and her only 
lover’s embrace will be the fetters of the Yicaria. Miladi’s 
new passion will not be smooth in its course !” 


CHAPTER XXXII. 

“SHALL evil be thy good?” 

Where the Greek faced her on the sea-shore there was 
a long silence between them — a silence breathless and 
pregnant, like that which precedes the first low muttering 
of a storm, the first dropping shots of a battle. Her eyes 
dwelt on his with a terrible despair in their startled depths, 
and his laughed back into them with the insolence and 
arrogance of power. Many times their strength had come 
in conflict, and many times the variable, unstable, serpen- 
tine will of the man had been crushed under the straight, 
scornful, fearless will of the woman. Now, for the first 
time, he had his vengeance, and she could not strike back 
on him, because for the first time he had found weakness 
in her, and could reach her through the life of another. 

He laughed aloud in his victory. 

“Choose, Miladi ! Your favorite maxims say, after 
the first passion all women love the love, not the lover. 
If you indulge the first you will slay the last. Choose 1” 

For all answer she swept with a sudden movement so 
close to him, that he fell back with the coward’s instinct of 
physical fear. 

“You have been often bought for murder. What price 
will you buy from it?” 


“ SHALL EVIL BE TIIY GOOD?” 


495 


The words left her lips with a scorn that bprnt like flame, 
with a bitterness that cat like steel. Neither touched him ; 
he laughed again in the content of his triumph. 

“What price, my Countess? None /” 

“You want gold — you love gold. You would sell your 
soul for gold. You shall have it.” 

The agony of dread upon her made her voice deep and 
hushed, like the stealing of an autumn storm- wind through 
forests; the passion of scorn within her made her face 
flush, and darken, and quiver, as though the flicker of a 
torch played on it. Neither moved him to shame. 

“Oh, yes,” he said, with a slow smile — “gold, gold, 
gold. Of course you would give me that. As much as 
you would throw away on a banquet, or a diamond, or a 
web of lace, should come to me, if I would stay aloof and 
hold my peace, and let the Border Eagle build his eyrie on 
the Roumelian hills, and Miladi pleasure her new passion 
among her rose-gardens. Oh, yes ! gold — as much gold as 
you have twisted in your hair for a mask ball might be 
mine, of course; and he — he should succeed to Julian’s 
dominion and Julian’s domain; he should have all that 
wood and water, and palace and mountains, that I have 
been banned out of so long; he should be chief there, and 
lord, and his sons, may be, have the heirship of the Yassalis 
line I A charming cast for us both 1 With all gratitude 
for my share, and your will to allot it to me, I must de- 
cline such a distribution betwixt your lover and me. Gold, 
gold 1 No, Miladi, gold will not strike the balance between 
us now.” 

She listened in silence ; only that passionate shadowy 
quiver, as of the light of a flame, on her face giving sign 
or response to him. Her lips were close pressed together, 
and scarce seemed to move as the words came through 
them, hard, like the dropping of stones on a stone. 

“Your sin is envy? Well, it is only another to a long 
list. Mere gold will not buy you. What will?” 

“ Nothing.” 

“You are so incorruptible!” 

“Yes, here.” 

“ Through envy, avarice, and hate !” 

“ Through three common movers of mankind, if so.” 


496 


ID ALIA. 


“ You own them yours ? Then listen here I speak 
nothingof your guilt to me — nothing of your crime against 
him. I will deal with you as though none of all that 
measureless iniquity were on you. Conscience you have 
not ; shame you do not know. I appeal to neither. I 
will treat with your avarice alone. You love self-indul- 
gence, luxury, vice, mirth, indolence, splendor ; you have 
coveted my heritage from the Yassalis, you have been 
thirsty for my riches ; you have wanted all that Eastern 
pomp and princely fief, you have hungered for Count 
Julian’s possessions, you have hated me for many things, 
yet for none so much as for the inheritance of that great 
wealth ; that you used it, and wasted it, and were wel- 
comed to it long as though it were your own, mattered 
nothing. It was mine, and not yours ; you never forgave 
the difference. Well, hear me now. All that shall be 
yours — all — all — to the last stone of the jewels, to the low- 
est chamber of the palace, to the poorest fig-tree on the 
hills, to the farthest landmark on the plains. You shall 
have all, and reign there as you will.” 

An intense eagerness thrilled through her voice, the 
burning wavering light upon her face grew hotter and 
darker, the chained bitterness and fierceness in her gave 
but the subtler inflection to the eloquence and the com- 
mand that ran as of old through all her words ; for the 
moment, she dazzled and swayed and staggered him. 

“All !” he echoed. “17” 

“ Yes — all ! Every coin, every rood, every bead of gold 
in that treasure-house of splendid waste I will make all 
yours — all that the Yassalis ever owned. I will not keep 
a pearl from the jewels, or a date from the palms. All 
shall be yours — all the things of your desire.” 

“And you ?” 

“ I — I shall be beggared.” 

Yet while she spoke, over her face swept one swift 
gleam, like the glow of an Eastern sun. 

He gazed at her like one blinded. 

“And for all this what will you ask of me ?” 

She lifted her proud head and looked down straight 
into his eyes. 

“ Of you I shall purchase — my freedom and his life.” 


“ SHALL EVIL BE THY GOOD?” 


49T 


His mouth quivered with rage as he laughed aloud once 
more. 

“ So-so ! Ah, the wildness of women’s passions ! You 
would buy your lover at that cost ? Oh, fool ! you who 
once were subtle and wise as the serpent !” 

Her teeth set tight, but she kept down her wrath. 

“ Profit by my folly,” she said, briefly. “ Take all I 
have — leave me only him.” 

The first words were stern ; over the three last her voice 
unconsciously softened with an infinite pathos and yearn- 
ing. 

That involuntary thrill of longing tenderness steeled him 
in an instant to the first eager impulse of acceptance, 
prompted by his lust for wealth and ease and power, and 
all the half barbaric voluptuous royalties of the Roume- 
lian palace that had seethed in him for so long. Other 
evil instincts were more potent still than avarice. He 
smiled, a slow and cruel smile. 

“ Magnificent ransom for a landless courier. But at 
what price will not your sex gratify its caprices — espe- 
cially the caprices of the passions ! Your lover should 
know the sacrifices y.ou would make for his embrace 1 For 
myself, the bribe is high ; but I decline it.” 

The blood faded from her face, even from her lips ; a 
gray, heavy shadow, as of desperation, fell over her, that 
seemed to drain the very color from her eyes and from her 
form, and leave her, white and chill there, as a statue. 

“ What will you gain ?” — she spoke with a hard, brief, 
stony tranquillity. 

“ Why — a romantic thing to be sure, and an unremu- 
nerative ; yet the sweetest thing, as men find, that the 
world holds — vengeance.” 

“ Neither he nor I have wronged you.” 

“ May be. But both have galled me ; both ” 

“ Been wronged by you. True. I forgot the reason of 
your hate.” 

His face flushed darkly. 

“ I do not bear you hate. I tried to free you. But I 
swear this man shall not wed with you, and live.” 

“And why? Have you not done us injury enough? 
You poisoned my life with infamy, and would have taken 


493 


IDALIA. 


his in a thief’s slaughter. Can you not let us be ? Can 
you not sell yourself for pity’s sake, as you have so often 
sold yourself for shameful things ? Take my bribe. Im- 
poverish me as you will ; enjoy all I have to give ; seize 
all you have ever coveted ; bind it fast to you on what 
terms you choose ; make me poor as the poorest that ever 
asked my charity, only leave me this one thing, his life.” 

She spoke still with the same strange enforced serenity, 
but beneath it there ran an intense melancholy, an intense 
yearning ; they could not move, but steeled him in, his 
purpose. 

“ The thing I will not leave you,” he said, savagely, 
“Ah ! I know how men go mad for that beauty of yours ; 
he would hold himself rich as emperors were that his own, 
though you had no other gold than just what gleams in 
the coil of your hair. I know, I know ! And so you can 
love at last, my queen ! — all that ransom for one wild 
mountaineer 1 But you shall only ransom him one way, 
Miladi ; only by — forsaking him.” 

“ I will never forsake him.” 

“ So ! Then his wedding night will be his last.” 

Her hand worked with a fierce, rapid, clinching move- 
ment on the butt of the pistol. 

“Wait,” she said, slowly, while each word fell on the 
silence like the falling of the great slow drops of a storm. 
“ You threaten him ? One word from me, and he will 
give you over to justice for your crime to him. One shot 
this moment from me, and he will be here to take his ven- 
geance.” 

He shrank slightly, for cowardice was ingrained in him ; 
but he knew how to deal with the brave and generous na- 
ture of the woman whom he tortured. He looked her 
lull in the eyes. 

“ True. You might send me to the galleys. But you 
will not.” 

Her lips parted, her breast heaved, a great shudder 
shook her. She answered nothing. 

“ You can summon your lover,” he pursued, after a 
pause. “You can tell him of my ‘crime,’ and — also of 
my tie to you. You can see us fall on each other, and 
fight as tigers fight. You can wed him in peace if he kill 


“SHALL EVIL BE THY GOOD ?” 


499 


me ; as most like lie will, since he is so far the stronger. 
You can do this. But you will not ?” 

From the depths of her agonized eyes a flash like fire 
passed over him. 

“I cannot! You know it.” 

He laughed slightly. 

“ No. I did not know it. Women soon vanquish scru- 
ples and tread out memories to gratify a passion. Well, 
since you hesitate so far, perhaps you will hesitate yet fur- 
ther. You will not break your oath by betraying me ; 
will you betray this one man whom you say you ‘ honor/ 
by linking him, in his good faith and his ignorance, with 
us ?” 

She gave a sharp, quick breath, as though a blow were 
struck her. 

“God forbid! I have said, all bonds between me and 
the past are severed forever.” 

“I see! You will lock the book, and throw it aside, 
and your blind worshiper will credit on your telling that 
the pages were all pure blanks ! And yet — I thought you 
said you ‘honored’ him ?” 

All the haughty, fiery blood in her flushed to life under 
the subtle sneer. 

“I do so ; from my soul. Let his name be. It has no 
place on your lips — yours — that gave the word to murder 
him.” 

“ Fine phrases ! And yet you will deceive him ?” 

“I !” 

“Yes, you, Miladi. You will not betray me to him — . 
you cannot. So — telling him nothing — you will leave him 
ignorant. And one fine day, were I to let you run your 
passion’s course, he would learn the truth, and find his sov- 
ereign, his idol, his mistress, his wife, my ” 

“ Wait ! You have said enough !” 

“ No. I say more. Forsake him, and he is safe from 
me. Give yourself to him, and I will add him his mar- 
riage-gift — death. Just such a death as he would have 
dealt me on the Bosphorus shore. I can see the gleam of 
his steel, and the thirst of his eyes, now 1” 

“ If he had killed you, what would he have done more 
than justice ?” 


500 


IDALIA. 


“At least he would have rendered you inestimable ser 
vice, Miladi !” 

She stopped him with an irrepressible gesture. 

“ Hush, hush 1 Oh, God ! such words between ws.” 

“ Well ! We are enemies ; bitter ones enough.” 

“ Yes ; enemies as the wronged and the wrong-doer ever 
are. But your life is sacred to me ; how can you curse 
mine ?” 

“ Mine sacred to you ? Is it so, Idalia? Then — being 
so, you will not betray me to your lover ?” 

She turned on him a look that had a weariness, a scorn, 
an agony, a pity unutterable. 

“No ! I must bear the burden of your guilt.” 

“ But you will betray him by leaving him in ignorance 
of whom he loves — of whom he weds ?” 

“ Though lie knew he would find mercy and greatness 
enough to pardon.” 

She spoke not to him, but to the memories that rose be- 
fore her — memories that filled her heart with their bitter- 
ness and their sweetness — memories of the exhaustless 
faith and patience and forgiveness of the man she was bid- 
den to abandon. 

“ Truly ! Then what think you, Miladi ? Is it a noble 
return to cheat him as you meditate? Is it a fine thing to 
recognize this limitless tenderness borne you, only to dupe 
it through its own sublime insanity? You have fooled 
such idolaters scores of times, I know, only — here I think 
you said you 1 honored 1 him? Which makes a difference; 
or might make it.” 

She knew well how wide the difference was — wide as 
between innocence and guilt. 

She answered nothing ; her face was gray and stern as 
stone, only in the brooding horror of the deep dilated eyes 
was there reply ; they spoke more than any language of 
the lips. 

The Greek laughed softly. 

“His bridal couch made in the nest of his ‘assassins!’ 
His stainless and glorified mistress proved the masker of 
the Silver Ivy! Madame, I think I might let his passion 
run untroubled, and leave my vengeance to the future — 
gome future when he should reach the truth from some 


“SHALL EVIL BE THY GOOD?” 


501 


chance word, from some side-wind — and hear the secret 
that a woman who ‘honored* him never told all through 
the days and nights she lived in his sight and slept upon 
his heart. Hear it when he was bound to her beyond 
escape, and could gain no freedom through knowing her 
traitress to him as to all others. Ah ! I am not so cer- 
tain that I will not let you wed him. It will be a surer 
stab to him than comes from steel — that one truth learned 
too late .” 

There was a long silence. 

She shuddered from head to foot, as though the scorch 
of a red-hot brand passed over and marked her; then an 
intense stillness fell upon her — a stillness in which all life 
seemed frozen in her, and every breath to cease. He 
waited, mute and patient now. 

At last she raised her head, and turned it full upon him ; 
as the reddened glow of sunrise flickered on it, it was dark, 
and cold, and resolute, with an exceeding strength and an 
absolute despair. 

“For once you have shown me duty, and saved me from 
a crime. My hand shall not touch his again.” 

“ Because you will not ” 

“ Because your guilt is on me.” 

“And yet you are willing to lose all your riches, and 
your power, and your victories, and your pleasures, for 
this one man ?” 

“ I am so willing.” 

“ Then it is ” 

“ That you have shown me what would be my sin to 
him. You cannot be betrayed. He shall not be.” 

“ You mean ” 

She turned on him ere he could speak with the swift, 
lithe, terrible grace of a stag hunted and hounded into a 
fierceness born of sheer torture, and wholly alien to its 
nature. 

“ Silence 1 or I shall forget what you are, and let him 
take his vengeance on you. Can you not be content ? You 
led me into cruelty and error a thousand times under the 
masking of fair colors and of fearless aims; you now show 
me, in the one redemption of ray life — the one purer, bet- 
ter, higher thing ! — only an added guilt, a fresh dishonor. 
I lose all through you. Arc you not content ?” 


502 


IDALIA. 


The vivid passion, the agonized irony, died suddenly, as 
a flame drops to the ground ; her head fell, her limbs sank 
wearily on the broken rocks, a full dead apathy returned 
on her, in which she lost all memory, even of his presence. 
He looked at her, hushed, awed, moved to something that 
was almost dread of his own work, intimidated by the sud- 
denness and the completeness of his own victory; he 
waited, hesitating, and as one afraid, some moments ; she 
gave no sign that she even remembered he was near ; 
every second wasted might cost them both the loss of lib- 
erty, if not of life ; but he lacked the boldness that could 
have pressed on her then the question of mere bodily dan- 
ger, the mere physical perils from the cell and the rods of 
her persecutors. 

There was that in her attitude, as she sat bowed, motion- 
less, with the loosened weight of her hair sweeping down 
into the salt pools of the beach, and an icy chillness of calm 
on the colorless immutability of her features, that subdued, 
and shamed, and had a nameless terror for him. 

Some sense of reluctant reverential fear was always on 
him for the woman whom, nevertheless, he had goaded and 
trepanned, and injured, and tortured through the length 
of many years. Some touch of love for her ever lingered 
in him. 

He paused a long while, at some distance from her, while 
the incoming tide rolled nearer and nearer up over the 
shingle and the sand, till the surf washed over her feet. 
She never noted it ; her eyes, without sight in them, gazed 
at the dusky changing mass of water that here and there 
beneath the spell of waking light broke into melting lus- 
trous hues, like the gleam of colors on a southern bird’s 
bright throat. 

He drew closer, with a doubtful hesitation. 

“You will come with me, then ?” 

She gave no sign even that she heard the words. 

“I am not alone,” he pursued. “ Lousada, Yeni, and 
the boy Berto sought you. I fell in with them as I neared 
here ; they are fugitives, and proscribed themselves ; they 
lie hid by day in an old sea-den of Veni’s ; they look to 
get away by the coast in a night or so ; they would give 
their bodies to shot and saber to save your hand from a 
rough touch. Will you come to them ?” 


u SHALL EVIL BE TIIY GOOD ?” 


503 


He could not tell whether she heeded him ; he saw her 
face in profile ; it was still, cold, passionless, stern with a 
mute intolerable suffering, like some Greek head in stone 
of Destiny. 

He felt a restless fear of his own victory. 

He spoke afresh, rather to break that death-like silence, 
filled only with the ebbing and the flowing of the sea, than 
for the sake of what he uttered. 

“ Yeni’s sea-nest is safe — safe, at least, for a little while ; 
it lies yonder, through there, where a passage-way pierces 
the rocks. All that acanthus hides the entrance. It has 
sheltered many before ; Fiesoli lay there once, in the first 
days of his proscription. Lousada doubts little that he 
can get a brig from Salerno, and steal away off westward 
three nights hence. It is the best chance. You will 
come V 1 

At last she lifted her head, and looked at him. 

“ But for Giulio Villaflor I would go — far sooner — back 
to the dungeon of Taverna.” 

His face paled ; he knew her meaning — knew the un- 
speakable loathing and scorn of himself that made the 
severities of captivity and wretchedness look fairer in her 
sight than every recovered freedom shared with his com- 
panionship. 

“ There is no other alternative,” he said, sullenly. “ You 
will come ?” 

“ I will come.” 

He was once more victorious ; and once more with vic- 
tory stole over him a strange chill dread, as he who has 
brought down and netted the lioness of the plains will feel 
something of awe, something of fear, when in his toils lies 
the daughter, the mate, the mother of free-born kings of 
untrodden soil — when beneath the rain of his blows, and 
from out the meshes of his trap, the great fearless luminous 
leonine eyes look at him, suffering but unquailing. 

“Why do you wait, then ?” he asked. 

“ I wait — -for him.” 

“ So 1 You will, after all, be false to one of us. Which V* 

“ Neither.” 

“ What gage have I of that ?” 

“ TLat I have said it.” 


504 


IDALIA. 


He was silent a moment; he scarcely dared dispute 
that single bond, her word. Traitor himself to her, he 
knew that his treachery would never be repaid him by its 
own coin. 

“ You wait for him ?” he said. “ Then so also do I.” 

“Are you weary of the shame of your life that you seek 
to lose it ?” 

“ No. But he shall take it rather than I will leave you 
here.” 

Through the calm upon her face, the calm of martyr- 
dom, of despair, he saw the conflict of many passions, of 
infinite misery. 

“ Will you choose for us to meet ?” 

Where her forehead rested on her hands that were thrust 
among the masses of her hair, the great dews started as 
they had never done when the scourge was lifted at Taverna. 

“ We shall not part alive,” he pursued. “ Perhaps you 
count on that ? Your lover is the younger and the stronger ; 
there are few men he would not worst. You rode all day 
through the heat and press of a battle under Yerona once, 
I remember ; may be you wish to see a life-and-death con- 
test.” 

She answered nothing ; a shiver as of intense cold ran 
through her. 

“ You can enjoy your new passion, true, if he kill me ; 
— a dead body flung with a kick into that surf, the waves 
to wash it seaward, none on earth to care enough for me 
to ask where I have drifted, — it would be easy work. Is 
that the reason why you ‘ wait 7 ?” 

“ God ! how can you link such guilt with me, even in 
thought ?” 

“ Why not ? That will be the end if we meet in your 
sight to-day, unless, indeed, fate turns the other way, and 
your lover falls through me. Sit there, Miladi, and watch 
the struggle ; you will never have seen two harder foes. 
Turn your thumb downward, like those dainty, haughty 
Romau dames you copy in philosophies and seductions ; 
turn it down for the slaughter-signal, if you see me at his 
mercy. How free you will be then ! But — listen just a 
little — if he press me too close, we have not the northern 
scorn of a timely thrust, and it will be but in self-defense I” 


UNTO IIIS LAST. 


505 


17 

As he spoke, he drew gently half out of its sheath the 
blade of a delicate knife that was thrust in his waistband, 
and let the beams of the sunrise play brightly on the nar- 
row shining steel. 

The glitter flashed close beside her. It sent fire and life 
like an electric shock through all the icy stillness of her 
limbs ; she rose with a convulsive force ; her eyes had the 
gleam of an opium-drinker’s in them, her voice had scarce 
a likeness of itself. 

“ I come, I come ; do what you will with me, so that his 
life escapes you !” 


CHAPTER XXXIII. 

“UNTO IIIS LAST. ” 

The Greek let the slender blade of steel slide back into 
its case. 

“ That is well,” he said, simply, while the radiance of 
his conquest played all over his arched lips and his fair 
brow; then, without other words, he took his way across 
the stretch of sands, and many yards onward swept back a 
deep screen of ivy and acanthus that closed the mouth of a 
fissure in the rocks, and veiled it so darkly that no sign of 
the break in the great mass of stone was seen. He signed 
to her to enter ; she obeyed him ; having once made her 
election, it was not in her afterward to pause, to waver, to 
retract ; having submitted herself to his power for another’s 
sake, she ceased to protest against that power’s use. The 
screen of matted foliage fell behind her, shutting out the 
day ; before her stretched the gloom of a long narrow arch- 
ing passage-way, hollowed through the thickness of the 
cliff, half sea-wrought and half pierced by men. She had 
come thither once in bygone years when the great pleader, 
Fiesoli, had hidden there, proscribed for too fearless a de- 
fense of a political prisoner; she passed straight onward 
now through the thick darkness, her hand on her hound’s 
43 


50G 


IDALIA, 


mane to still his longing rage, her tyrant following in her 
steps, flushed with the wine of success, yet silenced by a 
vague and restless disquietude. 

The length of the cavern wound like a tangled skein 
through the depth of stone, no light breaking through it, 
and the air was chill, and close, and dank, like the air of a 
tomb ; it was cramped and tortuous, and the hard jagged 
surface of the rock bruised her as she went. Once he 
stretched out his hand to guide her ; she shook it off as 
though it stung her, and passed on alone, more rapidly, 
and full as calmly, as though she swept down some sun- 
lighted terrace among the roses of a golden summer-time. 

“ She will never fear I 11 he thought ; and to the heart of 
the man that unconquerable courage of a woman brought a 
sullen impatient wondering veneration. He was a coward 
— a coward at the mere gleam of steel, at the mere com- 
mon, vulgar terrors of physical peril ; but in her he had 
never known one pulse of fear. There was a pang of wist- 
ful, painful envy in his thoughts for that one greatness 
which nature gave to her and had denied to him. 

At the far end of the vault a fitful ruddy light was 
gleaming ; it came from the flame, now leaping, now sink- 
ing, of a fire made of brushwood and the boughs of the 
maritime pine. Where the fire burned the passage opened 
out into a wider vault, divided into two or three arched 
chambers — natural caverns widened and heightened by 
art, and roughly made, by benches, and skins, and stands 
of arms, and beds of osiers covered with soldiers’ rugs, 
into a camp-semblance of habitation. A rude place, yet 
not comfortless, and with a wild beauty of its own, as the 
flame flashed on the many colors of the riven stone, and 
the stalactites that hung above broke in the glow into 
a diamond brilliance — a place that had been once the sub- 
terranean way of a great castle, which had long crumbled 
down to dust upon the cliffs above ; then the nest of roving 
pirates ; lastly, the refuge of proscribed revolutionists, of 
men who suffered for liberty of speech, and were content to 
perish under the deathly chillness of their country’s deepest 
night, so that through them the dawn might break for 
others later on. The sea-den was still as a grave, and 
well-nigh as lonely ; only by the pine-logs sat a boy of six- 


UNTO HIS LAST. 


507 


u 


Jf 


teen or so, with his fair curls turning to a red gold in their 
dancing flames, and his beautiful young Rafaelle faco 
drooped pale and weary over them. 

It was the lad Berto ; left sentinel while his comrades 
spent the daybreak seeking a vessel down the shore. He 
was but a child ; but he had long put away childish things ; 
years before he had seen two of his brethren fall side by 
side in an emeute of Milan, and ere then had been borne, 
in infancy, in a mountain flight in his mother’s arras, and 
had kept as his first memory of life the echo of his own 
vain cries when her heart grew still under his eager caress, 
and there flowed from her breast a deep stream like the 
purple flood that wells forth when the grapes are pressed 
— for the Papal troops had shot down like a chamois the 
woman who dared love, and follow, and bear sons to a 
republican rebel. 

He started, and rose with a sentinel’s challenge; then, 
as he saw who came, bowed low ; the weary sternness of 
his fair face never changed in boyish sport, or youthful 
laughter, or under the light of a girl’s shy eyes ; wrong 
had been stamped heavily on him too early, and if in his 
future life the purity and greatness of high aims should be 
marred in him by an unchangeable unrelenting chillness, 
like the chillness of St. Just, the evil would lie with the 
tyranny which had made the warmth of his rosy mouth die 
out on the ice of his mother’s bosom. 

Idalia moved forward to within the circle of the watch- 
fire, lighted as the sole means they had to illumine the 
gloom ; there was a deadly calmness in the mechanical 
actions that sent a thrill through the child Berto as he 
watched her where she sank down on the log covered with 
a shaggy ox-hide that he had vacated. She seemed un- 
conscious of his presence; and he knew that more than 
mere physical peril, which he had many a time seen her 
meet so carelessly, was upon her now. 

Phaulcon touched him. “ I will look to the fire, Berto ; 
go and sleep. You need it.” 

“ Her Excellency permits?” asked the boy. 

He spoke hesitatingly, reverentially ; beside the flower- 
hung waters of Yerona he had known this woman, now a 
homeless fugitive, ride through the heat of conflict and dis- 


508 


I DALI A. 


mount, and gather the spent balls under a raking enfi- 
lade, and heap them in her skirts, and mount him on he? 
charger to bear them to the revolutionary brigades, while 
she stayed on at her dangerous gleaning. 

She looked at him pityingly, but there was that in the 
look which Berto had never seen but once — when a woman 
of the Northern Isles had toiled wearily, begging her way, 
into Rome to look once more on her son’s face, and had 
reached in time to see the last earth thrown upon his coffin, 
while in the fair spring morning the French drums rolled 
a cruel music through the violet odors of the burial-place, 
and over the majesty and the shame of the great prostituted 
city. 

“Yes, go,” she said, briefly; “ you need rest. I will take 
your watch.” 

She drew his rifle to her, and leaned her hands upon its 
mouth. 

The boy went obedient ; in one of the inner hollows that 
served as bed-chambers his couch of grass was spread ; he 
had not lain down for three nights, and sleep sealed his 
eyes as soon as their lids were closed. Across the flame of 
the pine-logs the Greek watched her irresolute, embarrassed 
by his own success. It was dark as midnight in the heart 
of the pierced sea-wall; the play of the rising and falling 
flames fell irregularly on the gloom ; she sat motionless, as 
she had sat upon the shore, her elapsed hands resting on 
the slanted rifle, the tawny splendor of the fire cast on the 
splendor of her face. 

She thought no more of him ; she thought alone of the 
man who would return to find her lost once more — the man 
she must forsake or must betray ; whose body she must give 
to slaughter, or whose soul she must slay by abandonment. 
She looked down into the fantastic flicker of the resinous 
boughs as she had looked down into the ripple of the 
waters ; and, as he watched her, the same shame which had 
moved him for his sins to her, when he had heard of her as 
within the power of Giulio Villaflor, stirred in her com- 
panion ; it ever slumbered in him, at times it woke and 
stung him, yet it never stayed him from his sacrifice of her 
to the needs of his own craft, the lusts of his own avarice. 
To serve himself, he had warped and misled the *dealio 


UNTO HIS LAST. 


509 


ambitions, the fearless genius, the poet’s fate, the hero’s 
visions, that he had found in her earliest youth ; to serve 
himself, he had taught the keenness of her intellect intrigue, 
fanned her worship of freedom into recklessness, snared 
her to evil through the noblest passions that beat in her, 
taught her to hold her beauty as a mask, a weapon, a lure, 
a purchase-coin ; to serve himself, he had roused her 
bravery into defiance, her pride into unmerciful scorn, her 
wit into skeptic cruelty, and — when these were done — went 
further, and soiled the fairness of her life with the dusky 
imperishable stain of lip-rumored dishonor, and let the 
stain rest so that the world saw it as a reality; while she, 
knowing it false as foul, became too proud, too careless, and 
too callous to appeal against a world so credulous of evil, 
so incredulous of good, but took up in the haughty courage 
of an outraged dignity the outlawry which injustice con- 
tumeliously cast to her, and lived and fought, enjoyed and 
suffered, in grand contempt of all opinion, accepting, as 
her sentence, the yo contra todos, y todcs contra yo, until 
such isolation and such contest became to her things of 
preference and triumph. He knew that he had done this 
guilt against her — partly in the cruelty of egotism that 
profited through her injury, partly in the blindness of par- 
tisanship that thought all means justified to secure its end, 
chiefly, beyond all, in a rankling jealousy of those posses- 
sions and that inheritance which had made her so rich in 
power and in gold, while he was penniless and an adven- 
turer ; jealousy that the lavishness of her gift, the gener- 
osity of her thought, never tempered, but inflamed. He 
knew that he had done this, and that of his own act he had 
turned the tenderness of her heart toward him into abhor- 
rence, had changed the love and the faith she had once 
borne him into the hatred of a proud woman for her op- 
pressor, of a fearless temper for a coward, of a slandered 
honor for its traitor and its traducer. He knew that long 
before, in those bygone years, when he had crowned her 
young head with the wild laurel-leaves of Livada, and 
wooed her with subtle words to the Delphian laurels of a 
perilous strife and a perilous fame, the Greek child had 
fastened her deep eyes on him as though he were a god, 
and believed in him as though the voice of Delphos spoke 
43 * 


510 


ID ALIA. 


in h\3 ; and he knew that of his own act he had made the 
woman on whom he looked now, in the dusky ruby heat of 
the uncertain flame, scorn him with all the force of her im- 
perious intellect, shrink from him with all the abhorrence 
of a brave nature for a craven’s sins, and alone withhold 
her lips from curses on him as the ruin of her life, because 
memories that he had outraged had still their sanctity for 
her — because to the oaths he had broken she yet remained 
faithful. 

It had been wanton destruction he had wrought, it was 
irrevocable loss he had sustained ; some sense of all he had 
forfeited and killed when he had become her worst traitor, 
and had made the eyes that once sought his in love cast on 
him their righteous scorn, smote him heavily and restlessly 
now, as they sat, with the burning of the watch-fire between 
them, alone in the cavernous gloom. In the whiteuess and 
the immutability of her face there was a grandeur that 
awed him ; despite the weariness and alteration of fatigue, 
of fasting, of endurance, it was the stern, noble, disdainful 
beauty of the Yassalis race that he hated, Greek in its type, 
Eastern in its calm. He thought of the great palace of 
the Yassalis stronghold, far eastward, crowning its mighty 
throne of cedar-covered hills, with the treasures of ages in 
its innumerable chambers, and its sun-lightened plains rich 
in vine and olive and date, and watered by a thousand 
winding streams deep and cool under lentiscus shadows ; 
all that her great race had owned, and over which she had 
rule. 

“ If that had been mine — not hers — I would never have 
harmed her,” he thought. “ Wealth is the devil of the 
world. ” 

The intense silence, the night-like darkness on which the 
white smoke floated mistily with an aromatic scent, were 
horribly oppressive to him ; he had the nervous suscepti 
bilities of a vivacious and womanish nature. He addressed 
her; she did not reply. He set food and wine beside her; 
she did not note them; she sat immovable; the intense 
strain on all physical and mental power brought its re- 
action ; a dull stupor like that of opiates steeped her limbs, 
her sight, her brain in its lifeless apathy. 

He looked at her till he grew sick with the heat of the 


UNTO HIS LAST. 


511 


tt 


flames, with the blackness of the shadows, with the spice of 
the pine perfume, with dead memories that would come to 
him do what he would. He rose impetuously; he had been 
on foot or in saddle many days and nights, eating scantily, 
sleeping still less ; all his frame was aching, and his eye : 
balls were scorched with want of rest. 

“ You will not leave here ?” he asked her, half imperi- 
ously, half hesitatingly, since though he commanded he yet 
feared her. 

“No.” 

“ You give me your word ?” 

“Yes.” 

“ Then I will go seek for Yeni. He should be here ere 
now.” 

“ Go.” 

The monosyllables were cold, impassive, unwavering; 
to her he could be now and hereafter but an assassin, whose 
crime had been frustrated by hazard, yet could be none the 
less vile because in its issue foiled. She obeyed him lest a 
worse thing should come unto the man he had already 
wronged, but she submitted herself to him in nought else. 

He knew that, her promise given, twenty avenues of 
escape might open to her, and she would still profit by 
none ; he had known her keep her word and redeem her 
bond at risk and cost that might well have extenuated her 
abandonment of both. He turned quickly from the watch- 
fire, and went down into the shadow of the farther re- 
cesses, whence a steep cramped stairway, cut upward 
through the rock, led, like the shaft of a mine, into the 
lowest chambers of the building high above on the crest 
of the cliff : the bell-tower of the fallen castle, bare and 
crumbling to ruin, deserted, except when, as now, some 
fugitive who knew its secret sought its subterranean shel- 
ter. The stair was perpendicular and difficult of ascent ; 
he thrust himself slowly up it and into the dull twilight, 
that by contrast looked clear as noon, of the basement 
square of the campanile. He had no fear that she would 
fail her promise, but he had fear — a certain superstitious 
fear — of that grave, colorless, magnificent face bent above 
the pine glow ; he could not stay longer under the sense 
that her eyes were on him, under the scourge of her unuh 


512 


IDALIA. 


tered scorn, under the mute reproach that her mere life 
was to him. lie would not loose her to freedom, but he 
feared her. He breathed more freely when he left the 
darkness of the cavern for the upper earth ; he was fevered 
and fatigued, and timorous of the danger round them as 
any long-chased stag ; he cast himself down to rest awhile 
on the thick soft lichens covering the tower stones, close 
beside the mouth of the shaft, up which every faintest 
sound from the hollow den below came to him as dis- 
tinct upon the rarefied air as up the passage of an aural 
tube. 

Alone, by the blazing tumbled heap of pine-wood, her 
attitude never changed ; the light played on the metal of 
the rifle, in the red-brown of the hound’s eyes, on the 
scarlet and the gold of her soiled and torn mask dress ; 
beyond, on every side, stretched the dense Rembrandt 
shade of the vault; her eyes, wakeful with a terrible wake- 
fulness that seemed as though it would never again relax 
and sink to sleep, never stirred from the one spot in the 
red embers, which they looked at without knowing what 
they saw 

“ It is but just,” she thought, with that stern, unsparing 
self-judgment which was strong in her as her disdain was 
strong for the judgments of the world. “ I never paused 
for any destruction ; it is but just that I must destroy the 
only life I prize.” 

And as she thought her eyes filled with a great agony; 
justice on herself it might be, but how unjust upon the 
guiltless ! — upon this man who spent his heart, his honor, 
his very existence on her, only by her to be betrayed or be 
forsaken. 

Through all the varied dangers of her past, her courage, 
her genius, her instinct, her prowess had borne her out, 
even when at loss and with sacrifice, unscathed and uncon- 
quered ; here at last no one of these availed her, but she 
was bound, powerless and paralyzed, uuder the net of cir- 
cumstances. Before this she had never been vanquished ; 
l w she was chained down beyond escape beneath the 
weight of an intolerable oppression. 

The pine-embers glowing crimson on the gray ash dust 
seemed to stand out like letters of flame — writing of fire 


“UNTO HIS LAST.” 5a3 

that glowed around upon the blackness of the shadows, 
and seemed as though it repeated in a thousand shapes 
the words that had fettered all her life. Words uttered so 
long ago under the great dim oak glades of Greece, while 
the stars burned down through the solemn woods, and the 
moan of classic waters stole through the stillness of the 
night. Words that she had thought bound her by holy 
withes to noble thoughts, to sacred aims, to patriot souls, 
to the ransom of the nations, to the armies of the truth. 
Words pledged with a child’s faith, with a poet’s enthu- 
siasm, with a visionary’s hope, with the all-belief of youth, 
and with the glow of ambitions too high for earth, too 
proud for heaven. Words dictated by lips that she had 
trusted then as though an angel’s bidding spoke by them. 
Words that while she thought they but allied her to those 
who suffered the martyrdom of liberators, who fought for 
the freedom of speech, and creed, and act, and who were 
banded together for the deliverance of enchained peoples, 
fettered her, she knew too late, into the power of one man, 
into the obedience of evil. 

She had taken her oath to Conrad Phaulcon and to his 
cause, while in the splendor of her dreams and the igno- 
rance of her gracious youth she had held the one a stain- 
less patriot, the other a glorified martyrdom ; she had been 
trepanned through the truest beauty of her nature, blinded 
through the purest desires of her heart. The patriot was 
a knave, only the more perilous because also a coward ; 
the cause was a lie, only the more perilous because it stole, 
and draped itself in, the toga of Gracchus, the garb of an 
eternal truth. 

Slowly she had awakened to the sure agony through 
which all youth passes — the agony of disillusion. Slowly 
she had awakened to the knowledge that in giving herself 
to the service of liberty she had delivered herself into an 
unalterable thraldom ; that the guide whom she had fol- 
lowed as she deemed to the fruition of idealized ambitions, 
and the attainment of a stainless fame, was but a false 
prophet with a tarnished glory only in his gift, was but an 
outlawed and necessitous Camorrist, who saw in her beauty, 
and her talent, and her wide wealth from the vast Eastern 
fief so many means whereby to enrich himself and to ensnare 


514 


IDALIA. 


all others. And when she had learned it, aift felt its bitter 
falsehood eat into her very soul, he, lest she should break 
from him, had cast subtilely about her that poisonous film 
of imputed dishonor which once breathed never passes ; 
he had done it ruthlessly, or rather, let others do it and 
never said them nay, which served as well. She had been 
sacrificed, true, but that had been of little account to him, 
since through it the gold, and the harvests, and the luxury 
of the Roumelian possessions were shared by him ; his 
name alone, spoken with hers, had cast shadow enough to 
darken it. Then, when that last evil had been done against 
her, she had grown hardened to this world, which so easily 
believed against her ; she had grown callous to this out- 
lawry, which was pronounced against her through the 
errors of another. She was wronged ; she did not stoop 
to appeal or to protest ; the bravery of her nature steeled 
into defiance, the independence of her life accepted will- 
ingly an isolation which yet was a sovereignty; she had a 
wide vengeance in her power, and she took it — with too 
little mercy. 

Those memories thronged on her as they had thronged 
on her foe in the loneliness of the sea-vault, while that 
vow of implicit obedience to his will, of unvarying asso- 
ciation with his schemes, of eternal silence on his tie to 
her, and of eternal devotion to the interests of his order, 
which had many a time aroused in her such passionate and 
contemptuous rebellion even while she repaid his betrayal 
by fidelity, now seemed to stand out before her in the fan- 
tastic lines of the hot embers. 

That oath had coiled about her many a time, had sti- 
fled, and bruised, and worn, and stung her beneath all the 
pleasures of her abundant life, had made her the com- 
pelled accomplice of harm she strove to avert, had poi- 
soned those enterprises and those perils which were to her 
the sweetest savor of her years, had bound her down into 
an abhorred fealty to a dastard, and had driven her to 
loathe the sight of those fair hills and stately palaces 
whose heritage had rendered her the envy of her tyrant. 
Now it wound round another life than hers. She would 
have accepted as retributive justice all that could have bo- 
fallen herself, but here she could not suffer alone. 


UNTO HIS LAST. 


515 


n 

“ How can I save him ? How can I save him V' she 
thought unceasingly ; save him not alone from bodily peril 
and the fruit of his own noble rashness, but from the curs* 
of the love he bore her. 

All she could do for him was to save his mortal life ; 
all she could be faithful to him in was to withhold from 
betraying him. Her nature was strong, and she could 
have wrung her own heart, burned out her own desires, 
put away from herself all peace forever without faltering, 
could she thereby have purchased oblivion and rest for 
him ; but these things were unpurchasable ; his suffering 
through her was irremediable, and to endure this knowl- 
edge she had no strength. 

Time passed; she sat still there, her hands clasped 
round the rifle, her head drooped on its mouth, the flames 
now dying low to darkness, and now upleaping toward 
the black roof of the quarried rock. Motionless there, 
with the tawny luster of the fire on her, she looked like a 
statue of bronze, the outline of that attitude of frozen 
vitality, of mute despair, thrown out distinct in the hot 
ruddy light against the darkness of the cavern around. A 
deadening insensibility stole on her; she thought, and 
thought, and thought, till thought grew an unmeaning 
chaos ; the lengthened want of sleep brought on her the 
numbness of death by snowdrift ; she heard nothing, saw 
nothing, knew nothing, till a hand touched her, and a voice 
was on her ear. 

“ Oh, God ! what horror you gave me ! I traced the 
footsteps on the sands down to the mouth of this den, or 
else ■” 

The words died on Erceldoune’s lips, arrested there by 
the look he saw upon her face as it was raised and turned 
to him. In a breathless, pitiless silence they looked upon 
each other, the red gleam of the flames between, her head 
turned back over her shoulder in an intensity of terror 
that looked the terror of an infinite guilt, her whole frame 
shuddering from him, her haughty beauty changed into 
a shamed and shrinking thing of fear. He, who had 
pvayed that the seas might cover him if once her eyes fell 
beneath his own, read worse than his death-sentence in 
that look. His arms, that had been stretched out to her, 


516 


ID ALIA. 


sank ; out of his gaze, that had sought hers in such eager 
wonder, all the light died ; over his face passed the stern, 
cold, dark agony of doubt. 

“ You fear me — you!” 

The words were few, but they bore to her ear a re- 
proach beyond all others — a reproach too noble in its re- 
buke to quote the thousand claims upon her trust and 
honor that his acts had gained. They called her to her- 
self — to the one memory left her — that he must be saved. 
Her head fell — she had not strength to look on him — and 
she put him backward from her with a piteous gesture. 

“ I fear for you. Go — go — go 1 This place is death !” 

“ Your place is mine. Why are you here ?” 

She answered nothing ; she cowered there in the play 
of the fire’s glow, while ever and again her glance sought 
the gloom of the cavern’s recesses as a hunted stag’s seek 
the haunts of the forest whence his hunters may spring. 
She had said that she would keep truth both to her tyrant 
and to her savior ; she had said that she would never again 
touch with hers the hand of the man whom her caress 
would betray; she had no intent but to be faithful to 
both bonds. But she had not looked for the ordeal of the 
actual presence, of the visible torture, of him whom she 
bad consented to forsake ; she had no courage to face 
these ; she had taken no thought of how to bid him know 
their divorce was absolute and eternal. She was usurped 
by the one knowledge of the jeopardy his life was in while 
near him was the criminal who before had sought it — the 
criminal she had sworn to screen. 

His eyes softened with an infinite yearning as he saw 
her misery ; it was not in him to harbor doubt while pity 
could be needed ; his nature was long suffering and blindly 
generous ; he only remembered that the woman for whom 
he would have died a thousand deaths was there in her 
anguish before him — anguish that was for his sake, and 
was beyond his aid. He forgot all else, with that noble 
oblivion of a mind that takes no thought for itself. He 
stooped and strove to lift her up to his embrace. 

“ Why have you left me ? What is it on you ? If dan- 
ger, I share it; if evil, I pardon it.” 

She drew herself back before his arms could raise her, 


UNTO ms LAST. 


517 


t( 


79 


and let her bead sink lower and lower until her forehead 
touched his feet ; — that dauntless brow that had neve.! 
bent to monarchs or to prelates, nor drooped beneath 
threat or before peril. 

“As yon have loved me, loathe me. Go !” 

Leaning over her, he heard the faintly whispered words; 
he started with a shiver that ran through all his limbs ; 
the memory of the guilt imputed to her rolled back on 
him, like a great sudden wave of recollection, that broke 
down beneath it every other thought. “ It is a traitress 
of whom we speak,” it had been said to him ; it looked 
the remorse of a traitress that abased her at his feet. 

He stood above her, not raising her, not touching her, 
the unspeakable love and compassion in him straining to 
contest the doubt that froze his blood, the doubt that still 
seemed to his loyalty of soul so vile a crime against her. 
He was silent many moments, while the heavy throbs of 
his heart beat audibly on the stillness ; cast there before 
him in the hot half-light, all her beauty of form tempted 
him with remorseless temptation. So that she were his, 
what matter what else she should be, guilty or guiltless, 
dishonored or honored, with death or with peace in her 
kiss, with cruelty or with mercy on h°c lips ? All his soul 
went out to her in a great cry. 

“Oh God ! you are mine — you are mine ! What do I 
ask else — or care ?” 

It was the baser strength of his passion that cried out in 
those burning words ; their fire thrilled bnr, their echo 
woke in her ; yet with them the force which had never be- 
fore then failed her revived. Here lay his danger — this 
danger, born of her own loveliness, that would abase him, 
and allure him. and destroy him ; this danger, which filled 
her with one instinct alone, the instinct to tear him at all 
cost from this snake’s nest which held his foe, to compel 
him at all hazards from herself, through whom his destruc- 
tion came. She rose and locked her hands upon his arm, 
and pressed him forward out toward the mouth of the 
cavern. 

“ Go — go ! This place is death for you.” 

“ What ! — and you are here ?” 

The words were stern with the sternness of doubt and of 
44 


618 


IDALIA. 


demand as he drew himself back from her hold, and looked 
down into her face with a look that had never been in his 
eyes before when they had gazed on hers. The longing 
of his heart and the agony of suspicion strove within him 
against each other. 

A smile passed over her face ; the smile that is the re- 
signation, the self-irony, of an absolute despair. 

“ He doubts at last !” she thought. “ He can be saved 
through that.” 

And she had strength in her to hope from her soul that 
such doubt might wrong her deeply enough to spare this 
man some portion of his pang — might make her in his 
sight loathsome enough to be thrust out from every mem- 
ory, cursed yet unregretted. 

That smile stung him as scorpions sting ; he crushed 
her in his arras, ere she could escape him, in the ferocity 
of an intense torture. 

“ You smile at my misery ? Are you, then, the thing 
that they say — the beautiful, pitiless, glorious, infamous 
temptress, seducing men to your will that they may perish 
in your work, binding them by their passions that they may 
die at your bidding? Ah I my love, my love! only look 
iu my eyes as an hour ago, and I will curse myself that I 
ever asked you such shame ; only let your lips touch mine 
with their sweetness, and the whole world shall call you 
traitress, but I shall know you truth !” 

The impetuous, wild words poured’ out unchecked, inco- 
herent ; he scarcely knew what he uttered, he only knew 
that the kiss of this woman would outweigh with him the 
witness of all mankind ; they burned deep down into her 
heart, they brought the subtlety of temptation to her, in- 
sidious, sweet, and rank as honey-hidden poison. Her 
honor broken with one, her past withheld from the other; 
a bond ruptured, a silence kept ; this only done, and the 
sweetness of liberty and the liberty of love were hers. 

But she thrust it from her ; here she had no pity for 
herself, and here she had pity — exhaustless and filled with 
an unsparing self-reproach — for this man, who out of the 
very nobility of his soul, the very guilelessness of his trust, 
fell thus beneath her feet, and hung his life upon her. She 
had been merciless to others, devoting them to her need, 


519 


“UNTO HIS LAST.” 

breaking them through their own weakness, with die un- 
pitying contempt and rigor of intellectual disdain and of 
sensuous allurement; here she was merciless unto herself; 
here she bent, and broke, and cast away all her own life 
without pause or compassion. That which she had done 
to others she did also to herself. 

She unloosed herself from his hold, and looked at him 
with the cold, unnatural tranquillity which had had its 
terror even for the Greek. 

“ Who has called me a traitress ?” 

His eager eyes burned down with imploring appeal into 
her own ; the ardent fealty that would have disbelieved 
the voice of Heaven against her glowed through the heavy 
shadows of pain and dread upon his face. 

“A traitor himself — a liar who shall eat his lie in the 
dust. God forgive me that I uttered the word to you ; 
but you speak to me strangely, you drive me beside myself; 
— doubt has not touched me against you ; I would not soil 
you with so much as suspicion. Oh ! my loved one, your 
honor was safe with me ; — do not think that one shaft of 
his told, that one moment of belief gave him triumph. He 
spoke infamy against you, it is true, and I swore to him to 
bring that infamy to your hearing, but never because it 
glanced by me as truth, never save only for this — to prove 
him and brand him in falsehood. You know me; as I 
love, so I trust, so I honor.” 

She stayed him with a gesture ; she could bear no more. 
The swift, eloquent, generous words seemed thrust like 
daggers through her heart. The noble, fearless light of 
faith upon his face made her blind as with the luster of the 
noonday sun. This was the man she must forsake forever 
while their lives should last — this was the love that she 
must change into eternal scorn of her as of a wanton, mur- 
derous, living lie. Her martyrdom grew greater than her 
strength. 

“ Who was he ?” she asked. 

“ Victor Vane ; your guest, your frieijd.” 

“And he said ?” 

At the name her old superb irony flashed over her face, 
her old superb wrath gleamed in her glance, her lofty height 
rose erect as a palm, he-r eyes met his in all the fullness of 


IDALIA. 


520 

their regard. He needed no other denial of the calumnies 
attainting her. 

“ He said ?” 

“What your look has answered enough.” 

“No. What does he bring to my charge?” 

“Vileness that my lips will never repeat. Hall-truths 
wrung into whole lies, as only such men can wring them. 
Chiefly — he bade me ask you two things ” 

“ They were ?” 

“ Who it is that sought my life in the mountains, and 
what tie a Greek — Conrad Phaulcon — bears to you ?” 

A change passed over her face, like that change which 
steals all the living warmth and hue from features that the 
grayness of death is approaching. He saw it, and his 
voice came in broken rapid breaths, imperious and im- 
ploring. 

“Are they one — this Greek and ray murderer ?” 

She answered him nothing ; he saw a hot, deep flush rise 
upward over her face and bosom — the flush of a bitter deg- 
radation. 

A moan like a wounded animal’s broke from him ; he 
could not bear to live and see shame touch her. He stood 
above her, while the flicker of the fire glowed duskily upon 
the dilated wondering misery of his eyes. 

“Are they one ? Answer me !” 

She did not answer, nor did her look meet his. 

“ That man I showed you sleeping is this Greek !” 

She held silence still. 

“ What 1 You screen him in his crime ? What tie has 
he to you, then ?” 

Her teeth clinched tight as a vice to keep herself from 
utterance of the words that rushed to her tongue. 

He stared blindly at her; he felt suffocating, drunk, 
mad; he stood beside this woman, whose every tress of 
hair he loved, w r hose mere touch could send the vivid joy 
like lightning through his veins, and he arraigned her as 
her judge for having union and collusion with his attempted 
slaughter ! 

“ What is he to you? Where is he now ?” he panted. 
“You called him your worst foe. Do women shelter their 
foes’ guilt thus ? You would not let me take my justice 
on his life. What is his life to you ?” 


UNTO IIIS LAST. 


521 


il 


She looked at him with the rigid calm returned upon her 
face, impenetrable as a mask of stone. 

“ I said that there were things that you could never 
know. This is of them. I have withheld your justice 
from, you ; I have known your assassin, and kept the 
knowledge untold to you. I have erred against you — 
greatly. Think of me what you will, what you must.” 

The reply was spoken with a cruel mechanical precision; 
she moved from him and stooped above the pine-logs, 
seeking their heat. She felt as she had done when once, 
in a Livonian winter, the night-snows had overtaken and 
enshrouded her, and the life had begun to turn to ice in her 
veins. 

Something in the very action bespoke a suffering so 
mute and so intense that it struck to his heart, still so 
closed to evil and so open to faith, so slow to give condem- 
nation, so quick to render trust and pity. He threw him- 
self beside her, drawing her hands against his breast, 
searching her eyes with the longing love, the bewildered 
incredulity, of his own. 

“ Think of you ! What can I think ? You are my mis- 
tress, my sovereign, my wife ; you take my love and yield 
me yours ; you have smiled in my eyes, and lain in my 
arms, and spoken of a lifetime passed together ; and now — - 
now — it is my murderer who is sacred to you and beloved 
by you — not 1 1” 

As though the fire of the words stung her into sudden 
life, she turned swiftly, all the light, and the fever, and the 
anguish of passion breaking one moment through the 
frozen tranquillity of her face. 

“ Not you ? Ah ! would it were not, my love, my love, 
my love I” 

In the yearning of the accent a tenderness unutterable 
broke out and burst all bonds ; as he heard the darkness 
passed from his face — a glow like the morning shone 
there. 

“ You love me thus ! You cannot have betrayed me ” 

She stayed him ; she knew that this glory of reawaken- 
ing joy must be quenched in an eternal night. 

“Wait. I love you. I cannot lie to you there. But 
44 * 


522 


ID ALIA. 


that ends, now and always. I say, you have been sinned 
against heavily; I must sin also against you — sin without 
shame by forsaking you, sin with shame by life with you. 
I choose the least. We are divorced forever. We must 
be as are the dead to one another. Forgive me, if you 
can ; curse me, if you cannot. Whatever you do, leave 
me, as though death were in my touch.” 

All the ardor, and the yearning, and the warmth had 
passed from her voice ; it was sad as despair, and inflexible. 

He listened, watching her with a grave wondering pain 
and pity ; he had his own thought of the meaning of her 
words, and the patience and the belief in him were in- 
finite. 

“ Though death came by you, do you think that I would 
leave you ?” 

The great salt tears sprang into her aching eyes ; in her 
agony she could have set the muzzle of the rifle to her 
forehead, and died there at his feet. She had a more mer- 
ciless ordeal — to live and make herself loathsome in his 
sight. 

“No; you would not,” she answered him. “But — if 
dishonor came by me ?” 

His frame shook with a sudden shudder, but still she 
could not turn away the enduring tenderness that would 
not take even her own witness against her. 

“ You use cruel words,” he said, while he stood above 
her with the dignity of a judge, with a great nobility in 
the pity of his gaze. “ Hear me awhile. I have learut 
more of your past to-day ; I think that I can imagine 
what I do not know of it. I think that you have been in- 
volved in evil, but through errors that had root in virtues. 
I think that many have betrayed you and attainted you 
through the very bravery and generosity of your nature. 
I think that you have been bound with criminals because 
you first held them to be patriots, and because your bond 
was sacred to you even when sworn to worthless men. Do 
I think aright ?” 

She heard in silence ; her soul went out in honor and 
adoration of this man, who, out of the truth and the vir- 
tue of his own heart, judged and divined her life thus 
rightly, despite all weight of circumstance, all darkness of 


523 


“unto his last.” 

calumny. But she knew that to leave him to think this 
was to bind her to him for evermore. She knew that he 
must think else than this ere he would be forced from alle- 
giance to her. 

“You think nobly, because you think by the light of 
your own heart,” she said, in her teeth. “ But it is not this 
that you were warned to think to-day ! Your counselor 
was nearer right. Believe him !” 

“ Were you what he said, you would not tell me that. I 
judge you thus by the light of your own nature. You 
speak to me of divorce — of dishonor. You know the 
coward who attempted my life, and will not render him up 
to my justice. These are bitter things ; yet I can see day 
through them. It may be that you have fallen among 
much guilt, and yet are unstained amid corruption. It may 
be that you shield a crime, because to expose it would be 
treachery in you. It may be that you elect to forsake me 
because you cannot reveal to me that full truth of your 
past which should be one of my marriage-rights. This is 
how I judge you. If I judge rightly — I said to you that 
you could not stretch my tenderness further than I would 
yield it. I say so now ; trust only my love, it shall never 
fail you.” 

“ Oh, God ! cease, or you will kill me !” 

She swayed forward, and sank down at his feet, her 
brow and bosom bruised on the cold jagged floor of the 
cavern ; she had exceeding strength, but she had not 
strength enough to hear those tender words and give them 
no response; to behold this limitless forgiveness stretched 
to her, and leave him to think her too callous, too abased, 
to return to it even gratitude and repentance ; to know 
that, as he judged her, he struck to the very core of fact, 
and rendered her but sheer and rightful justice, yet that 
the acceptance of even this justice at his hands was denied 
her through an alien crime. 

He stood above her, the great dew gathering on his 
forehead ; the evidences against her that her accuser had 
uncoiled one by one in so close a sequence thronged on 
his memory; her attitude, her misery, her abasement, had 
so much of guilt in them, yet had so far too much of suf- 
fering to be the cruel, wanton, voluntary guilt of such a 


524 


ID ALIA. 


woman as her calumniator had declared her to be — to be 
guilt, sensual, tyrannous, and self-chosen. 

He stooped to her, and his voice was so low that it was 
hardly heard above the beatings of his heart : 

“ I cannot tell ; is it — not justice that you need, but 
pardon ?” 

She answered him nothing where she had sunk in that 
bowed, broken abandonment. The nobler his pardon, the 
darker was the wrong against him. She could have kissed 
his feet, and cried out to him for forgiveness, as though 
her own hand had done that murderous iniquity against 
him. She could better have borne his curse than she could 
be&r his tenderness. 

He touched her; his hand shook like a leaf. 

“ Is it so ? I can bear to know you are human by error ; 
you shall be but dearer to me for the truth with which you 
redeem it.” 

She looked at him with a swift sudden movement that 
raised the full beauty of her face upward in the tawny 
flame-light ; it was colorless, and lined with the marks of 
the damp stones, and had all its proud glory soiled and 
dimmed, yet it had the graudeur of an intense sacrifice, of 
an intense passion, in it. 

“Ah, you are just and pitiful as a god ! Give no pity, 
give no justice here. Only leave me — leave me, and never 
look upon my face again !” 

*' For what cause ?”■ 

“ For the cause — that of my people your murderer 
came.” 

He looked at her with a terrible incredulity, that was 
slowly hardening into the stern chill desolation of doubt 
that he had put from him so long with so leal an alle- 
giance. 

“Of your people! You called the Greek to me your 
deadliest foe ?” 

She was silent once more ; the testimony of half the 
nations of the earth would have failed to weigh with him 
against her : but by her own blows the storm-proof fabric 
of his faith was swaying to its fall. 

He laid his hands upon her shoulders, crushing under 
them the loose masses of her hair. 


525 


“unto his last.” 

“ First your foe, then your comrade — hated and shel- 
tered — condemned by you, and screened by you. What is 
he to you, this man for whom you forswear yourself thus ?” 

She answered nothing ; the red shadow of the fire 
gleamed upon her face, but it was not so dark and so hot 
as the flush of shame that scorched there. His hands held 
her like iron. The force of jealousy rose in him ; the 
ferocity of bitter suspicion worked in him ; against all 
witness he had disbelieved every accusation brought to 
stain her, but he could not disbelieve the meaning of that 
silence, of that humiliation, of that conscience-stricken 
abasement. 

The patience, so long strained, broke at last. 

“ They say this brute was once dear to you ? Is it true, 
since you cover his crime so fondly?” 

She did not reply; her head was bent so that he could 
not look upon her countenance, but he could see the heav- 
ing of her breast with its rapid, laden breathing. 

His hands grasped her with unconscious violence ; he 
knew neither what he did or said ; he knew only that she 
could not meet his eyes, that she could not answer his 
challenge. 

“ Is it true ? — that you once loved him ?” 

She bowed her head ; a faint, chill, deadly smile crossed 
her lips one moment, she smiled as men, lying broken on 
the wheel, have laughed. 

A cry loud and hoarse rang from him down the stillness 
of the vault ; he staggered where he stood, and loosed her 
from his hold, and stretched his arms out mechanically, as 
though he had grown blind and sought support. The 
merciless light of certainty seemed to have stricken his 
sight as lightning strikes it ; that hideous assurance of 
conviction had come on him, against which the mind is at 
once and forever conscious no appeal is possible. 

Had she denied it, by the trustful tenderness of his na- 
ture, the evil told against her would have passed, leaving 
no stain, no shadow even, of mistrust of her ; but before 
that affirmation of her gesture, before that condemnation 
of her silence, it lay no more with him to choose between 
belief and disbelief. His faith fell, as a tree must fall 
when its roots are severed. 


52 6 


IDALIA. 


“ There is one man — one man only — that your mistress 
ever loved.” 

The words seemed whispered by a thousand voices that 
rushed down the empty air ; he had been betrayed by her 
that this criminal might be sheltered from his vengeance ! 

He knew it ; in that horrible hush of stillness that fell 
between them, his heart stood still, his very life seemed to 
cease ; it was out of her own mouth that he condemned 
her. His throat rattled, his words burst, scarcely with 
any human sound in them, from his parching lips. 

“What! you kneel there and tell me this thing — you 
who swore to me that no kiss but mine ever touched you ? 
What? you fooled me with love words that you might 
lead me off the scent of my vengeance ; you turned a liv- 
ing lie to harbor a murderer ? Such vileness is not in 
woman ! You a traitress ! — a wanton ! — a slave of your 
senses ! — a priestess of vice ! Oh, God ! Say the whole 
world is false, but not you !” 

She held silence still. Her head dropped lower and 
lower, as though each word of that appeal were a hurled 
stone that beat her down lower and lower in her abasement. 

He forced her upward in his arms with the unwitting 
violence of suffering, and strained her once more to his 
embrace, and covered with kisses her lips, her brow, her 
bosom. 

“ Say it — say it. Say the world lies and you are true, 
or — or — I think I shall end your life and mine !” 

Her eyes, heavy with the mists of a great misery, fath- 
omless and hopeless like the eyes of the Fates in Greek 
sculptures, gazed up to his. 

“ Do you dream I would stay your hand ? It were best 
§o — so I should be yours yet.” 

“ Mine ! What then ? — you love me though you are my 
traitress ?” 

The word rang in sullen echo down the stillness of the 
cavern ; a hard bitter agony passed over her face. 

“ One may have guilt and yet have love,” she muttered, 
faintly. 

He shuddered as he heard her ; in the answer a subtle 
tempting coiled around him ; the perfection of her earthly 
beauty might be his, though it were but the love of th<« 


521 


“UNTO HIS LAST.” 

wanton wherewith she loved him ; the taint on her soul 
could not steal the fragrance from her lips, the voluptuous 
light from her eyes, the mortal glory from her loveliness. 
The baser passions of his soul longed for her, though 
every evil that swells the sum of human crime had place in 
her — though through her should come to him sin, and des- 
olation, and dishonor. Yet he was not their slave ; the 
greatness of his nature rose above them, and trampled out 
their tempting. He put her from his arms lest his strength 
should fail him, thrust her back from him so that her breath 
should be no more against his cheek, her heart throb no 
more on his own. 

“ Love that is faithless and shameful ? What is that to 
me ? If you have wronged my vilest foe, the woman 1 
loved is dead.” 

The sentence in its brevity had a despair deep as death. 

Where she stood before him she bowed her head, as be- 
neath words that had the weight of a righteous law. For 
this — that he rose higher than his passions? tempting, that 
he strangled the assailants of his senses, that infidelity to 
his enemy would have been as dark in his sight as infidelity 
to himself — she honored him with a great reverence. 

“ Yes. She is dead,” she answered him, with a strange 
dreamy repetition. “ Where has she ever lived save in 
your visions ? She is dead — go. Do not wait by her 
grave.” 

There was a terrible meaning in the hushed hopeless 
words; across their calmness a single cry broke — a cry 
that had in it all the desolation of a ruined life, of a break- 
ing heart. 

Then silence fell between them. She had no courage 
to look upon his face ; she dared not read all that she knew 
was written there. 

The drooping flames reached a dry bough of pine, and 
flared afresh with it, and rose up in a writhing column of 
light that flashed its ruddy glow into the darkest shadows 
of the cavern. As the flames darted into luster they shed 
their hue on the fair head of the Greeek stretched out in 
all its velvet beauty from the deep gloom of the farther 
vault. He drew back swiftly, as the tell-tale glare searched 
for him and fell upon his face. 


528 


IDALIA. 


Before he could reach the shelter of the inner den, the 
one he had wronged saw him, and, with the leap of a 
staghound, hurled himself upon him, and dragged him 
from the depths of the vault forward into the full light of 
the flames. The slight limbs of the Athenian had no force 
against the vengeance of the man who saw in him at once 
his murderer and her paramour; he was torn out from his 
lair and tossed upward, as a wrecker’s hands may toss a 
beam of driftwood. 

Erceldoune forced him downward into the circle of the 
burning pines, so that full in their light and full in her sight 
he should take his justice on the wretch who had once 
struck at his life, and now took far more than life from him. 
He only knew that this was the man who had sought to 
assassinate him ; that this was the man for whom and to 
whom she betrayed him. Yet, beyond the memory of his 
vengeance, beyond the violence of his hatred, beyond the 
rage of jealousy in his soul, was a terrible pathos of won- 
der that looked out at her from the reproach of his eyes ; 
it was for a thing so vile as this she had betrayed him ; it 
was for a life so infamous as this that she had given herself 
to guilt ! 

Reeling, swaying, striving, they wrestled breast to breast, 
strangers from the far ends of the earth, yet bound together 
by the kinships of wrong and of hate, while .she, who had 
cast herself between them, strove to part them — strove to 
tear them asunder — strove with desperate strength to end 
their contest. Erceldoune thrust her back, and flung her 
heavily off him. 

“You stayed my hand once — not again. Stand there, 
and see the felon you harbor die as curs die !” 

His face was black and swollen with the lust for blood 
that she had seen there when he had fought with the Nea- 
politan Churchman. Wound in one another, they strug- 
gled together, seeking each other's lives, with the breath 
of the flames hot upon them. The Greek’s lips were white 
with fear, but they laughed as he glanced aside at her. 

“You love to see men at each other’s throats! You 
love to see tigers play ? So, so, Miladi ! — then look here.” 

He slipped loose with a swift, supple movement, and freed 
his right arm. There was the glisten of steel in the light; 


529 


“unto ms LAST.” 

the blade quivered aloft to strike down straight through 
heart or lung ; before it could fall his wrist was caught in 
a grip that snapped the bone, and, wrenching the knife 
from his hand, flung it far away into the depths of the cav- 
ern, while the sinewy arms of the man he had wronged 
gathered him fresh into their deadly embrace. The slender 
southern limbs had no chance, the serpentine suppleness 
had no avail, the fox-like skill had no power, against the 
mighty frame and the ruthless will of the avenger who at 
last had tracked him ; a shrill scream broke from him as 
the steel was twisted from his grasp, the numbness of dread 
overcame him as he was choked in the arms of his victim, 
and down into his looked the unbearable fire of the eyes 
he had left for the carrion-birds to tear. A sickly horror, 
a fascination of terror, held him breathless and unresisting 
to the will of his foe ; Erceldoune swung him upward, and 
held him, as though he were a dog, above his head, his own 
height towering in the glow of the flames. 

“ Oh, God 1” he cried in the blindness of his agony and 
of his hate. “Is there no death worse than what honest 
men die for this brute?” 

She threw herself on him, she seized the loose folds of 
his linen dress, she held him so that he had no power to 
move unless he trod her down beneath his feet. 

“ Spare him ! — for my sake, spare him I” 

“ For your sake ! You dare plead by that plea to me ?” 

“Oh, Heaven 1 what matter what I plead by 1 Give me 
his life — give me his life.” 

“ The life of a murderer to the prayer of a wanton ? A 
fit gift 1 Stand back, or I shall kill you with your para- 
mour.” 

“ Wait ! — you do not know what you do ! I saved your 
life from him — let that buy his life from you 1” 

He stood motionless, as though the words paralyzed him ; 
all the tempest of his passions suddenly arrested ; all the 
wild justice of revenge, that had made him strong as lions 
are strong, turned worthless as at last he grasped its power 
in his hands. The blow that struck him was memory — the 
memory of that death-hour when through her hands life had 
been given back to him. 

By that hour he had sworn that she should ask what 
21 45 


530 


IDALIA. 


she would of him, and receive it. At last she claimed hei 
debt ; claimed by it the remission of her si is — claimed by 
it mercy to the companion of her guilt. 

He stood motionless a moment, the leaden night-like 
shadows heavy as murder on his face and on his soul — 
then at her feet he dashed the Greek down, unharmed. 

44 What you ask by my honor — take by your shame. ” 

And, without another look upon her face, he went down 
through the gloom, and out to the air, to the sea, to the 
day, ere his strength should fail him, and the stain of blood- 
guiltiness lie on his hands. 


CHAPTER XXXIV. 

41 1 GIVE MY BODY FOREVER TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT 
AND PINE.” 

Conrad Piiaulcon slowly gathered himself from the 
ground, faint, blind, staggering from the force with which 
he had been thrown, and looked on her where she had 
fallen senseless — her proud head sunk on the gray wood- 
ashes, her face white with the whiteness of death. He 
thought her dead : and a mortal dread fell on him, a mor- 
tal chillness froze his heart. In his own cruel, tyrannous 
way he loved her still, and he thought that he had killed 
her. Moreover, she had been faithful to him. Listening and 
watching there, he had found that she had kept her bond 
to him, and had not betrayed him. The evil against her 
died out from him ; a shame that was almost remorse stole 
on him. Senseless there, like some fair statue shattered 
down by a hand that stayed not for sake of beauty or of 
genius, she smote his conscience, all dulled, and crushed, 
and burnt out though it was. Throughout their lives he 
had betrayed, and oppressed, and goaded, and dishonored 
her ; throughout them she had done him good for evil, and 
been true to him against his own untruth. This strength 


“1 GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT. ” 531 

and this fealty pierced him harder, because of their utter 
unlikeness to the cowardice and the greed of his own nature. 

With hands that trembled, and tears that stood thick in 
his eyes, he touched her, and sought to revive her; his 
temper was the temper of a child, and he had a child’s fleet 
facile emotions, a child’s wanton cruelty and worthless re- 
pentance. Like a child, he could wring his bird’s throat 
without mercy, and weep useless tears when the victim lay 
cold and huddled in death. 

“Idalia — Idalia ?” he murmured, softly. He feared the 
sound of his own voice in that stillness. 

After awhile sense returned to her; her lips parted with 
slow struggling breaths, her veins grew warm, her eyelids 
quivered and opened heavily to the glare of the resinous 
flames. She knew him where he bent above her, and lifted 
herself with a sudden breathless shuddering force. 

“ Go, go, go ! Never dare come again in my sight !” 

He lingered, scared and awed by the words and the ges- 
ture that were like an imprecation upon him, by the blaze 
of her eyes as they unclosed, wide and wild, to the tawny 
light. 

“ Go, go !” she cried afresh. “ You could hear what 
he deemed me, and hold your peace ! Go — there are 
wrongs gods themselves could not pardon.” 

He knew it; he turned slowly away, and went from her 
glance, from her presence. 

She rose faintly, and reeling slightly ; her eyes dwelt on 
the black noiseless gloom and the checkered play of the 
flames, with that gleam, like the gleam of madness, in 
them, that had had irresistible terror for the man she ban- 
ished. She stood awhile looking out at the darkness that 
closed her in, while for all the world without the morning 
sun was shining. She was like one drunk with alcohol ; 
her brain was stunned, yet her force intensified ; the power 
and the vitality in her were strong almost to ferocity — the 
ferocity of that unbearable suffering which is in itself a 
madness. Like some lithe-limbed leopardess, stung to 
bloodthirstiness by the dastard shot that has struck it from 
an unseen hand, she passed swiftly across the depths of 
shadow to the place where the boy Berto lay sleeping still 
in the intense -dumber of long fatigue. 


532 


ID ALIA. 


She laid her hand upon him. “ Wake.” 

He did awaken, and sprang wonderingly from his bed of 
dry sea-grasses. 

“ Illustrissima ! What is there ?” 

“ There is need of you.” 

“ I am ready.” The fair, pale, boyish face had the calm 
keenness of the Napoleonic type. “ It is ?” 

“ Treason.” 

“Ah!” 

His eyes caught the terrible meaning, his mouth the ter- 
rible smile, that were on hers. 

“ Treason — against me ; if to me, so to all, so to Italy. 
A traitor never sins once . Go seek Lousada and Yeni ; 
seek your brethren, seek any one of our people. They 
know how to avenge the unpardonable sin. Bid them 
bring him here ; I will give him his sentence.” 

The boy smiled — the smile of a St. Just. 

“ He has lived his life,” he said, in the old Roman idiom. 
“ His name, Eccellenza ?” 

She stooped and breathed it on his ear : the name of 
Victor Yane. 

Without word or pause he bowed low, took his rifle, and 
went on her errand ; a child by years, yet already weighted 
with the weariness and the wisdom of‘ maturity, by reason 
of the penalty he paid for having let his childish soul brood 
over the burdens of the peoples, and dream of liberties un- 
der the leprous shadow of* a dominant priesthood, while 
other children laughed, and played, and only asked of life 
that the vine should give fruit, and the sleek herds milk, 
that their gay feet should ply in the tarantala’s measure, 
and the sweet sun dance in their own bright eyes. 

She, left there in solitude, and bound by her word to 
keep the limits of her den, paced to and fro in the fire-lit 
darkness in that fierce, futile rebellion with which she had 
paced the dungeon of the Church. Her eyes were burn- 
ing, her throat was swollen with long thirst, her teeth were 
locked like a vice. All sense, thought, volition, seemed 
scorched up and withered in one intolerable misery, one 
unalterable shame. One thing alone seemed left to her — 
her vengeance. 

She was of the nature which happiness makes sweet, 


“I GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.” 533 


rich, generous, as southern sunlight; which calamity ren- 
ders fearless, strong, and nobly calm beneath all adverse 
fate ; but which wrong and treachery in an instant turn 
hard, dark, dangerous as the force of iron. 

She laughed aloud, in the loneliness. 

“ He played the traitor ! — so I Well, he will learn how 
we deal with traitors. Fool, fool, fool !” 

Then, as that laugh died, the weakness of her bodily 
frame, the agony of her soul, beat down the false alien 
strength of bitter passions. 

“ Oh, my love !” she moaned. “ It was for your life, 
not for mine.” 

And she sank down amid the gray ashes by the fire that 
was slowly dying out, with the stupor of exhaustion steal- 
ing on her, and her eyes fastened on the gloom beyond, 
strained, and senseless, and savage with pain, like those of 
an animal that is chained to a stake for the torture. 

To her, there could have been no martyrdom like the 
martyrdom of undenied dishonor ; borne for his sake, and 
incurred through the fulfilling of her oath. 

Without, the boy Berto passed into the white hot glare 
of day. His errand was perilous ; and he knew what 
Tedeschi rods were like, how Papal steel could thrust; but 
he had the firm, silent heart that Nature early gives to 
those whom she will hereafter make leaders among men, 
and, having a purpose to accomplish, he did it unflinch- 
ingly, through to the end. He went swiftly and straightly 
now over the lonely shore, with the eye of a hawk, with 
the speed of a greyhound, glancing on every side for those 
he sought, and going warily, lest he should be seen by the 
soldiers, whom he knew were out, more or less near, seek- 
ing for the proscribed who had escaped them. He ran 
swiftly, mile on mile ; reaching a crest of land, he paused 
at last for breath. On one side lay the sea, now blue and 
laughing in the full noonday; on the other, mountain- 
bounded, the low-lying lands, with their broad sunlit des- 
olate tracks dotted with the herds of swine and grazing 
buffaloes, with thickets of wild myrtle and green pools oi 
water. There he saw what made him drop suddenly, and 
hide like a young hare. 


45 * 


534 


IDALIA. 


What he saw were the barrels of carbines among some 
acanthns-covered stones that screened a score or so of sol- 
diers, and farther onward the solitary figure of a man in 
the clothing of the Capri fishers. The soldiers lay close, 
their heads alone above the fallen blocks of shattered tra- 
vestine ; the tall form of the Capriote, dark and towering 
against the intense light, came onward, fast, blindly, taking 
heed of nothing, seeing nothing, in his path, passing straight 
through the horned cattle as though they were an insect 
cloud, with his head bare to the heat, and his eyes without 
sense in them ; headlong, as if he were deep in drink, yet 
with a nameless, terrible madness on him that had as terri- 
ble a majesty. 

Fascinated by it, the Roman boy watched him as he 
reeled through the sunlight, while the browsing herds were 
scattered by the tornado of his course. Others watched 
him also, as he came nearer and nearer straight across the 
plain, pausing for no obstacle, breaking through all vege- 
tation, passing like the wind over the width of the country. 
Then, rapidly as a lasso is thrown*, the soldiers sprang upon 
him as he passed the broken stones ; his arms, his limbs, 
his body, were bound and knotted with cords ere he could 
cast off one of the score of hands that seized him ; fet- 
tered, powerless in an instant, with the naked blades flash- 
ing round him, he stood like a wild horse netted by Guachos, 
his mighty muscles panting under the close-drawn bonds, 
his eyes wide-opened on his captors, red and glaring and 
senseless. There was no escape possible. 

He stood a moment, looking vacantly down on his bowed 
limbs and the savage wolf-eyes of the soldiery. All con- 
sciousness seemed dead in him; he had rushed on through 
the scorching day, till, had they not arrested him thus, he 
would have fallen sun-stricken ; he was passive from the 
sheer intoxication of suffering, and he was weak in his body 
also, for, from a wound on his shoulder, blood was oozing 
through his shirt. Yet, as he felt the withes on his limbs, 
he made one bound, like some magnificent forest animal 
entrapped; he fought against his captors then on the sheer 
instinct of combat, with his head dropped like a bull of 
Aragon when it charges to give to the torreador the fatal 
blow of the oogida, and with his firm white teeth, the only 


“I GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.” 535 

weapon left him, clinched hard and fast at the throat of the 
soldier nearest him. 

For some minutes there was a struggle that made even 
the bold veins of the Roman boy run chill — weakened, 
hampered, jammed, powerless as the captive was, he had 
terror for his assailants, as the bull when its black hide is 
steeped scarlet with gore, and its flanks are transfixed with 
the lance-heads, carries death for picador and banderillo 
still. Then, brute force conquered ; the hirelings of Francis 
were scarce better than brigands, and courage awakened 
no homage in them. When they fell away a little from 
each other, and the dust of the parched plain that had risen 
in clouds above the scene of the conflict sank, they had 
pulled him down as with a lasso — he was stretched there 
on the short burnt turf, his eyes distended, his mouth filled 
with sand, his limbs lashed fast with cords. 

To them he was but a Capri boatman, a thing of the 
people, a scum of the sea, a rebel on whose life a good price 
was set, an animal to be thrust to the shambles, how roughly 
mattered little so that out of his heart they should cut that 
which they sought to know. 

They heaved him up, with a kick, by the ropes they had 
passed round his waist and under his shoulders; they loos- 
ened a little the cords binding his ankles, and bade him 
stand, holding a carbine at his head ; then they fastened 
him by his belt to two of the strongest-built of their band, 
and, with bayonets fixed in his rear, drove him on in their 
center as the Aragon bull is driven on at the point of the 
lance from pasture to circus. 

So they took their way through the white breadth of the 
sunlight over the brown lonely plains, with their prisoner 
set in their midst. He had never spoken once. 

The child Berto rose slowly from his hiding-place in the 
low myrtle-bushes ; many a time his hand had been on his 
rifle to send a message of death through these wolves of the 
Apennines who wore the king’s livery, and dishonored the 
title of soldier; as many times he had paused, knowing 
that one shot could avail nothing, and that, were it fired, 
he would only share the captivity of the man whom he 
sought to release. As his slight girlish frame rose up out 
of the leafy screen and against the sunny blue of the sky, 


536 


IDALIA. 


his teeth were set tight, his pale features had grown like 
marble. 

“They go to take him to their captain; — they will make 
him tell where her refuge is. If he will not tell, they have 
rods, they have the water-torture — drop, drop, drop, ah 1 
till one is mad !” he muttered aloud, in his breathless rage. 
He knew nothing of this stranger, save that he guessed 
him by his dress to be the sailor whom he had heard had 
rescued her from Taverna — in the cavern his sleep had been 
too profound to awake to any distant sound— but the sight 
of the conflict and the capture alone sufficed to rouse all 
the revolutionary and patriotic soul that was in him. He 
wrung his hands as he watched the soldiers move over the 
plain, growing dark and distant as some far-off troop of 
buffalo. 

“Ah, the brigands ! the assassins ! And I could not fire 
a bullet for him I” he cried, in his solitude. “Miladi must 
know of it. She can say whether he will bear the scourge 
and be silent. If I had thought he would speak, I would 
have shot him dead before they could have got him. Almost 
I wish I had. It had been surer.” 

For the Roman lad knew the means — passing the strength 
of humanity to endure — by which men who were mute against 
royal or priestly will w T ere made to find voice in that fair 
dominion of Naples. 

“ She must know,” he mused ; — waited an instant, then 
with the speed of a lapwing, once having the swell of the 
hillocks between him and the soldiery, he retraced his way 
over the lowlands to whence he came, until out of the laugh- 
ing brilliancy of the noon-sun he came into the darkness of 
the cave, which now was only lightened by the low flicker 
of the expiring pine-flames. 

Her attitude had never changed. There was that in it, 
as she sat beside the great heap of silvered ashes and of 
burnt-out wood, that struck the boy’s heart with a sudden 
awe and fear. The abasement, the subjection, of a fearless 
life has ever in it a certain terror — the mournful terror of 
every falbn greatness — for those who look upon it. 

He went softly to her, and spoke low in her ear before 
she saw him by her. 

“Eccellenza, the soldiery are out.” 


“I GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT. ” 531 

She gave no sign that she heard him. 

“The soldiers have him ! Can you trust him, IUustris* 
sima?” 

She still seemed to hear nothing where her gaze was 
fixed upon the dying fire. The boy touched her timidly. 

“ The king’s people have him, Miladi. Will he be 
true ?” 

She started, as though some corpse had been galvanized 
to life, and turned her face to him. 

“ True ? Will who be true ? Ho whom all are false to? 
Yes, true to death — true to death !” 

He saw that her mind wandered, that she had not aright 
understood him. 

“ Eccellenza, hear me,” he said, softly. “ The soldiers 
have made that friend of yours their prisoner.” 

A cry broke from her that woke all the echoes of the 
cave, and thrilled the lad with its piteous wail ; she sprang 
to her feet, convulsed to passionate energy, to fresh ex- 
istence. 

“ Prisoner ? The king’s prisoner ? — he!” 

The boy’s voice sank to a whisper ; he had not thought 
it would move her thus ; he knew she was well used to 
send men out to die. 

“ They took him on the shore there, by the ruins ; they 
caught a brave man like a snared wolf, the cowards ! He 
fought — gods ! how he fought ; but they threw him like a 
bull in the lasso. Will he keep silence, think you ?” 

“ Will he? He will keep silence till they lay him mute 
in death. Ah ! God reward you tlmt you came to tell me ! 
Keep silence ? He would perish by a thousand tortures 
ere ever he would betray his darkest foe !” 

She knew nothing that she uttered as the words poured 
from her lips; she put the wondering child aside, and 
swept across the vault to the chill dense shadow where the 
Greek had crouched ; she stood before him ere he had seen 
her move. 

“1 break my word to you. I go from here.”' 

“Go!” — he rose dizzily; the violence of his fab had 
stupefied him. “Go! Not where I do not follow.” 

“ Follow, if you will.” 

“ Where, then ?” 


538 


IDALIA. 


“ To the soldiers of Francis.” 

She laughed aloud as she spoke — the laugh of a break- 
ing heart ; she knew that the cowardice of his nature would 
no more let him pass out where she went than if gates of 
adamant opposed him. He was startled and bewildered ; 
he felt tenfold fear of her as she stood there in the shadows 
before him, with that despair ou her face and that laugh on 
her lips ; he had thought her dead or dying ; a superstitious 
hesitation held him afraid and irresolute. 

“Wait — wait,” he said, stretching his hands out to hold 
her. “ What is it you dream of? What mad thing would 
you do ?” 

“ Save the life you and I have sent out to destruc- 
tion.” 

Before he could arrest her she had passed him, and was 
far out beyond the watch-fire, and lost in the gloom of the 
entrance passage ; her hand was on the boy Berto’s shoulder, 
and thrust him out down the tortuous passage, swiftly and 
silently up to the open air. When once more the darkness 
lay behind her, and on her face was the breath of the morn- 
ing, she bent to him. 

“ Which way ?” 

He pointed to the northward, looking with wistful anx- 
iety in her face. 

“ Miladi, what is it you will do ?” 

“ My duty — late in the day.” 

The hound had followed at her side ; she stooped and 
kissed his forehead, then sent him from her back into the 
shelter of the cavern, reluctant, yet obedient. 

“ Will you not need him ?” the boy asked. 

“ No. Even a dog’s life is too noble to perish for mine. 
See you to him, and cherish him for my sake.” 

“II I go with you, Eccellenza.” 

“ No — go rather on the errand I gave you.” 

“ But ” 

Hush ! I have said — none go with me. And — for that 
you came ahd told me this thing — may the beauty of life 
rest with you ever, my child.” 

She passed her hands softly over his fair curls, with the 
glow of the morning fallen full on her eyes, and the bright- 
ness of the sea lying before her. 


“I GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT. ” 530 


Then as rapidly and silently as a shadow passes she went 
from him on her fatal way. 

Over the heavy, rugged ground the soldiers forced their 
prisoner, with his arms lashed behind him, and the carbines 
held at his temples. They were a dozen men under a 
corporal, scouts sent out by the commandant of the gen- 
darmerie scouring the shore; low scoundrels who had been 
thieves ere they donned the king’s uniform, and would be 
brigands when they had doffed it. So that they dragged 
him to their captain, and compelled him to tell what they 
sought from him, they heeded nothing beyond. His bound 
feet stumbled over the rough declivities, his chest was stifled 
under the crossed cords till he could barely breathe ; with 
every jerked step that his guards took over the roughness 
of the ground their shot might be lodged in his brain ; the 
red ants disturbed in their hills, swarmed up his limbs and 
clung there ; the open wound of his shoulder was cut by 
the tight-drawn ropes; still he said not one word, but went 
on in their midst, with his bloodshot eyes staring out at 
earth and sky yet seeing nothing, and with a heavy, sullen, 
murderous darkness on his face and on his soul. 

Of physical suffering he was insensible ; the deadness of 
despair had numbed in him all corporeal consciousness. 
There had only survived in him the mere mechanical brute 
instincts of defense and of resistance. Beaten in these, he 
resigned himself, passively, dumbly; too vast a ruin had 
fallen on his life for him to heed what befell his body. So 
far as thought still was distinct to him, so far as any ray of 
it pierced the blackness of desolation in which every memory 
save one was lost, he wished that they would strike him dead 
upon the plain they traversed. 

They wondered that, cramped and bruised as he was, and 
strong to ferocity as they had found him, he went with them 
thus mutely and unresistingly ; they did not note the keen, 
hard, ravenous, longing look, as of one starving at sight of 
food, that his eyes ever and again cast upon the steel tubes 
of the slanted carbines that carried death and oblivion so 
near, and yet denied them to him. 

Beyond this he knew nothing; he was dragged over the 
low-lying country at a pace as swift as the heat of the day 
and the unevenness s>f the uncertain paths would allow; 


540 


ID ALIA. 


whether he had force to bear it, ia the sultry noontide of 
summer, they never heeded. If he had fallen, they would 
have pulled him on still, as best they might, with his head 
striking the stones* He knew nothing ; the sunlight was 
like the blaze of fire ever about him ; the hard, hot skies 
seemed to glitter as brass; water, mountain, the darkness 
of myrtle, the rush of wild birds, the blue gleam of the sea, 
the brown baked earth beneath his feet, these were all 
blurred, shapeless shadows to him, while his eyes looked 
out, straight onward, with the red, dusky, mastiff flame in 
them that made his guards mutter among themselves that 
this man was mad, and should be shot like a mad dog. 

And they judged right: he was mad, with the Othello 
madness that believes what it adores dishonored. 

At last their march paused ; the silence was broken by 
the noise of loosened tongues ; there were stir, and tumult, 
and the clash of arms around them; they had joined their 
comrades, they had brought their prisoner to their captain 
to be judged. Under some mighty pillars of yellow traves- 
tine, the lonely relics of some forgotten temple, four or five 
score of black-browed, loose-harnessed soldiers, the worst 
of a worthless army, were scattered, lying full length in 
the shade, taking their noonday meal, or slaking their 
thirst at a sluggish noxious streamlet stealing by the 
columns’ base among the violet roots. They had been 
checked a moment in their search by the sea for the fugi- 
tives ; and lay like hot, panting, ferocious dogs, ready to 
rise and use their teeth at a moment’s tempting. 

They swarmed round him like a pack of wolves, but no 
change came on his face; with a hundred soldiers round 
him, lean, savage, ruffianly, for the most part, as any Ab- 
ruzzian banditti, with the glitter of their steel, the muzzles 
of their carbines, the yelling of their oaths, the clamor of 
their triumph about him where he stood powerless in their 
midst, they could not tell that he even saw them there. 
His eyes never glanced to them ; they looked still, straightly, 
sightlessly, to the low line where sea touched sky; there 
was no consciousness in them, but there was that reddened 
light that stilled their riot of exultation with a vague sense 
of danger in this chained man standing so calmly in their 
hostile crowd. 


“I GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT. ” 541 

They fell back as their commander, told of the capture, 
came from the nook of shadow, where, with his subaltern, 
he had been at rest apart. He was little more than a 
guerillero — a coarse, rough, careless, Calabrian-born fili- 
buster. 

He glanced over the captive brought him, in whom he, 
like his men, saw but a fisher of Capri. 

“A fine animal,” he muttered, as he glanced over a paper 
of instructions, comparing the details there with the per- 
sonal appearance of his prisoner. “ So ! you are the sacri- 
legious scoundrel who broke into the monastery of Taverna, 
and used foul violence against the august person of his 
sacred grace Villaflor?” 

“ I am.” 

Erceldoune answered mechanically; his tongue clove to 
his mouth ; his voice was hoarse and savage. 

“ Basta ! you are in haste to be hanged !” swore the 
Calabrian, half disappointed at an avowal which left him 
no excuse for the ingenuity of threat and torture. “ Since 
you confess yourself guilty, go further, and tell us — what 
have you done with the bona roba you stole from her 
prison?” 

The word struck like the stroke of lightning. 

Life, sense, shame, grief, rage, rushed over his hearer 
with a torrent’s force ; the foam gathered on his lips ; he 
strained for a moment like a fettered lion at his bonds ; — 
then he was still as with the stillness of death. 

“ Speak — where is she ?” 

He made no answer. 

“ Have you no tongue ? We will make you find it, and 
use it. Tell me — quick ! — where is this woman hidden ?” 

His vengeance was in his hands ; one word, one gesture 
only, to where the sea-cave lay, and his wrongs would be 
avenged, without the lifting of his hand. 

“ Speak out,” hissed the soldier, whose rage was rising. 
“ Where is this empress democrat ? Where does she hide ? 
She knew how to use that buffalo strength of yours ; but 
she will fool you, once she be free. We know what Miladi 
is I Give her to us; and you may save yourself a neck- 
lace of hemp mayhap ?” 

There was still no answer to him ; the great dark eyes 
4G 


542 


IDALIA. 


of his captive looked out, far beyond him, far beyond all 
around them, with a dry, vacant, senseless agony in them 
that never changed. 

“Has the sorceress put a spell on you?” swore the 
Calabrian. “ Look you — you are safe to go to the gal- 
lows. Corpo di Christo 1 — it will be odds if his Grace do 
not think a quick twitch of the noose too gentle a punish- 
ment for you : Monsignore has a long arm and a heavy 
hand ! You are a fine animal — it were a pity all that 
sinew should rot in quick-lime ; we will get your life saved 
somehow, if you put us this minute on the track of your 
mistress ?” 

lie might never have spoken for aught by which he 
could tell that he was heard. The threat that his body 
would be given to slaughter had little import to the man 
in whom all life, save the mere breath of existence, had 
already been slain by worse than a thousand deaths. 

“ Have you no voice ?” yelled the commander, infu- 
riated that his unwonted offer of mercy met no response. 
“ We will find a way to make you speak, with your will or 
against it! Once for all — will you show us where this 
woman is sheltered ?” 

“No.” 

The Calabrian gnashed his glittering teeth. 

“Altro! You defy us, you hound? We will see how 
long that obstinacy lasts. I have license to deal with you 
as I see fit ; to string you up by the throat to that column 
if I judge it right in the need of my service. We will 
soon make you find voice, you dog of a rebel ! Here ! 
take him, and lash him to that pillar; there in the full 
sun.” 

He was already bound fast, in cords that crossed and 
recrossed, and left him scarce liberty to draw the air 
through his lungs ; it was an easy matter to fasten him to 
the shaft of the shattered column that stood in the glare 
of the noon, unshaded even by a branch or a coil of ivy. 

“ Strip his shoulders, and let the gnats find him out,” 
laughed the Calabrian, moving away to finish his meal and 
take a mid-day slumber. “ We will see it‘ they and his 
thirst do not make him give tongue.” 

He was obeyed. 


“I GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT. w 643 

They stripped the linen from his chest and shoulders, 
and left him, lashed with cords to the travestine in the 
fullest force of the vertical rays; his wound uncovered, 
and his head bare. At his feet ran the half-dry brook. 
They went themselves into the shadow, and lay laughing, 
swearing, mocking, taunting, chanting obscene songs, and 
holding up to him in the distance the wine cans they had 
drained. 

The insults passed by Erceldoune unnoted, the jeers un- 
heard ; in the desolation of his life they were known no 
more than the sting of an insect is felt by one whom the 
smoke and flame of a burning pile is consuming. 

Yet they had chained him to a martyrdom. 

The intense heat poured upon his brain; the' scorch- 
ing light quivered about him ; his veins swelled till it 
seemed, With every fresh pulse of the blood, they must 
burst; the innumerable winged insects, humming through 
the summer hours, attracted one by another, settled on his 
naked breast, and thrust their antennae into the bruised skin, 
and pierced their stings into the opening of the wound. 
He could not free his hands to brush one of them away. 
His throat was dry as leather ; his tongue was swollen and 
black ; his thirst was unbearable ; and at his feet the shallow 
water stole, to madden him with the murmur of the cool 
i ipples he could not touch. The moments were as hours ; 
the minutes as years. The earth, the air, the sky, were as 
one vast furnace that inclosed him ; where the jagged and 
beating nerves had been laid open by the hatchet stroke, 
the buzzing gnats alit, and clove, and stung, and feasted. 
Weaklier men would have had the mercy of insensibility ; — 
with him the vital strength, the indestructible force of life 
within him, kept every nerve and every sense strung to 
their keenest under the torture. 

Yet when they came to him ever and again and asked 
him if he would speak at last, his silence remained un- 
broken. He was faithful to those who had betrayed him. 

He could receive release, as he could take vengeance, by 
the utterance of one word. He could deliver over his as- 
sassin to justice, and unloose his traitress to the doom that 
waited her, by the same sign that should free him from this 
slow excruciating death. He cou’d cease to suffer, and be- 


544 


ID ALIA. 


come the just accuser of those by whom he was destroyed, 
lie could sever his bonds, and divide those whose guilty 
union was a worse agony to him than it lay in the power 
of his torturers to deal. His own fate and theirs rested in 
his choice. 

And he bore his martyrdom and kept silence. The su- 
preme hour of his passion had come to him and tempted 
him, and found him strong. The purity of his honor would 
not let him take a traitorous shame even against those who 
dealt him treachery; the great love in him could not for- 
sake her utterly, although itself forsaken and betrayed. 

The bond of his word was as religion to him still ; and 
in his sight, though fallen, lost, dishonored, she still was 
sacred. 

So far as thought could come to him in his agony, his 
thought was still to save her. 

And he hung there, bound by the waist, with the blaze 
of the sun in his blind eyes and on his throbbing brain, and 
the clouds of the booming circling gossamer wings growing 
darker and larger as his tormentors swarmed down to fasten 
upon him. 

One of the soldiers, whom he had heavily bruised in the 
struggle for his capture, came out of the shade and dipped 
a wooden cup in the brook, and held it just beyond the reach 
of his lips. 

“ Speak, and you shall have drink !” 

His throat was baked like burnt clay, his mouth was full 
of dust, his tongue was cloven to his teeth ; he longed for 
water with the death- thirst of the desert. 

The Italian reached and touched his beard with the rim 
of the cup, so that the coolness of the draught mocked 
him close. 

“ Will you speak ?” 

He faintly moved his head in denial. 

The soldier laughed with taunting mirth, and shook the 
water from the bowl out on to the herbage at his feet: he 
knew that every wasted drop would be an added pang. 

Still he never spoke. 

They left him again to the Tantalus torture. lie had 
his freedom in his own choice ; in the utterance of one 
word; and he let them do their worst upon him rather 


“i GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.” 545 

than turn traitor to the woman whom he held his trait- 
ress. 

They came and grouped about the pillar, and looked up 
in his face again with riotous laughter and foul-mouthed 
outrage at him in his defenselessness. The brazen sky 
burned above in pitiless fire ; the smiling cruelty of the 
salt sea mocked him with its tossing sunlit freshness ; the 
red ants were slowly climbing the base of the column, 
scenting blood, and swarming upward to fasten on him ; 
through the air the first mosquito winged its way, herald 
of troops to come. 

“Will you answer now ?” asked the chief. 

He turned his aching, scorching eyes on them, while his 
mouth could scarcely whisper the reply : 

“No!” 

The Calabrian flung himself round on his men in the 
rear. 

“ Take him down, and scourge him till you cut the truth 
out of his heart !” 

They were like a h6rd of Pyrenean dogs ; the sight of 
prey roused all their ravenous iustincts. Men tasting once 
the power and the pleasure of torture rarely pause till they 
lose their sport to the king- player, Death. 

They unbound him from the columu, and fastened him 
afresh to a low block of stone, stripped to the waist, so 
that his chest and back should be left undefended for the 
curling thongs of the lash ; his face was set still seaward, 
so that the fair breadth of the free waters mocked him with 
its liberty. His head hung heavily downward ; throes of 
pain like the scorching of fire throbbed through his wounded 
flesh, the rushing of pent-up blood filled his lungs, his brain, 
his ears, his throat to suffocation. There was a pause of 
some moments ; they were weaving together some cords 
and some leathern belts into the thing they needed. The 
chief sauntered near him once more, and looked at him 
doubtingly ; he knew the Capri mariners could be dogged 
in brainless obstinacy as any Capri mule, but he saw that 
this man’s endurance was far more than the mere mute, 
contumacious persistence of a sullen ignorance. He struck 
away, half compassionately, a gnat that was alighting on 
his prisoner’s bare breast. 

2 K 


46 * 


546 


IDALIA. 


“You are too fine a brute to be cut in pieces with the 
lash. Look you, they have tough arms, have my men ; 
they will make their belts lay your lungs open if you keep 
silent. Do you know how the leather can eat a man’s 
flesh ?” 

He bent his head in assent ; in Russia he had seen a serf 
die under the scourge. 

“You do? Well, that grand frame of yours will not 
spare you ; they will mash it to pulp. Will you not speak 
— now ?” 

“ I have answered.” 

“ You are a fool and a madman I” swore the Calabrian. 
“You lose your life for a worthless woman.” 

A spasm that the bodily torture had never brought there 
passed over his captive’s face. He kept silence still. 

The Italian shrugged his shoulders, and strolled away. 

There was a moment’s longer pause, then two soldiers 
came to their work ; they had the whips that they had 
made, with the heavy buckles at the end of the belts serving 
as the leaden points with which the lash is commonly 
weighted. The blows would fall from either side as the 
strokes of the woodman’s hatchet fall on a tree. The rest 
of the band closed round in a semicircle, their commandant 
slightly in advance. 

Then — then only — as he saw the scourges in their hands, 
and knew the indignity that approached him, the mute 
calm of his endurance, the apathy of that desolation of the 
heart in which all bodily suffering passes as naught, changed 
and broke. All the fire of his nature, all the pride of his 
race, all the dignity of his manhood, flashed to sudden life; 
he never spoke, he was bound, motionless, but he raised his 
head and looked them full in the eyes, with all the haughty 
passion of his fearless blood once more aflame. It was 
jut one look; his arm could not avenge him, nor his 
strength resist the outrage; yet before it they paused and 
quailed. For the instant they stood irresolute, cowed by 
the challenge of his unshrinking leonine regard ; then, 
savage at their own sense of shame, they threw themselves 
forward, the metal-weighted thongs swirled round their 
heads, gathering full force to curl around him like a ser- 
pent’s folds; the watching soldiery drew deep noiseless 


“I GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.” 54T 

breaths in silence, the hot hushed air of noon had not a 
sound upon it ; he stood erect to his full height, the courage 
of the soul victorious over the torture of the body ; before 
the uplifted hands could fall, a single word echoed down 
through the stillness — “ Wait!” 

The scourgers paused ; the chief swung round to see 
Vho dared bid his men’s obedience halt; into their startled 
crowd came the woman they sought. Against the glitter 
of the sea and the brown desolation of the plains, they saw 
Idalia. 

From the captive they had bound a long bitter cry rang 
— a cry that the lash would not have forced from him, though 
it should have cut his heart in twain. 

Breathless as a long-chased stag, she pressed her way to 
him and fell at his feet, and strove with both hands to wrench 
apart the knots that held him, and looked upward at his face 
with the dumb agony of the brute’s. The Calabrian seized 
her, and drew her back ; he knew her but by name, and her 
face was strange to him. 

“ Woman ! — how dare you ? Who are you?” 

“I am Idalia Yassalis. Take me — bind me — scourge 
me. But let the guiltless go.” 

The rough mountaineer looked at her amazed, awed, 
dazzled, doubting his own senses. 

“ You are the Countess Yassalis?” he echoed, slowly. 

There in her mask robes, with the gold all soiled and 
blackened, the scarlet aflame against the sun, breathless, 
worn, exhausted, yet with such command in her eyes, with 
such misery on her face, with such majesty in her glance, 
she moved him to fear as the sight of Cleopatra, captive, 
would have moved a Latin boor of the cohorts. 

“ Yes, yes, yes ! Are there no men here who can swear 
to me ? I am the rebel you seek. Take me ; do what you 
will with me ; deliver me up to your masters — but free that 
man who is innocent !” 

The Calabrian shaded his eyes with his hand ; he felt 
giddy before her. 

“ Is it she ?” he whispered a comrade. 

“ It is she,” said a Lombard from the ranks. “ I saw 
her before Yerona ; my shot killed a horse under her.” 

She turned her head to the soldier. 


648 


ID ALIA. 


“ I thank you for your witness. Now — do your duty. 
Bind me, and free your prisoner. ” 

“ Free him ! So ! — he has as much guilt as you.” 

“ He has no guilt. You tortured him to discover me ; — 
now that I yield myself to you, what plea have you to hold 
him longer? Unloose him, I say ; fasten me there in his 
stead ; use those thongs upon me ; it will not be the first 
time you scourge a woman. Take him down, and bind me 
there in his place by every justice in earth and heaven !” 

Erceldoune’s voice crossed her own, husky and forced 
with difficulty from his swollen, parching throat. 

“ Do nQt heed her. She speaks only to save me ” 

The Calabrian laughed coarsely. 

“Ah ! This fine Capriote dog, is he your love toy, then, 
dlustrissima ?” 

“ He is ray victim. May not that better release him ?” 
The coarse outrage had no power to wound her; she 'had 
no consciousness except of the man who, for her sake, was 
bound in the cruel scorching noonday well-nigh to the 
pangs of a crucifixion. “ Is he to suffer for those who 
have wronged him ? He does so when he suffers for me. 
If I be your enemy, I am tenfold his ; will not that quell 
your rage against him ? I have ruined him ; that should 
give him grace in your sight. From first to last he has 
been wronged by me. Plundered, wounded, left for dead 
by those who were of my people ; used by me, forsaken 
by me, driven to peril and bondage by me — has he not 
more to hate me for than you ? In the nobility of his heart 
he shields me still, because he once has pledged me shelter, 
because his honor still is greater even than his immeasura- 
ble wrongs ; but he does so only because he is above even 
his own just vengeance, only because he will not purchase 
freedom even at cost of lives that are his curse.” 

She sank down at his feet once more ; she strove to 
rend his bonds asunder ; — he seemed to her great as 
never man were great in that silent martyrdom, endured 
for those who had betrayed him. He looked down on her, 
doubting his own senses, doubting that the burning of the 
sun made him, in delirium, dream the words he heard, the 
face he saw. 

“ Free him !” she cried aloud, with that ferocity of unbear- 


“I GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.” 549 

able misery which makes the gentlest savage. "What 
plea have you to hold him? I am here; I surrender to 
you. Take me to king or priest, as you choose ; give me 
only his liberty for mine !” 

Instinctively his heart went out to save her; his con- 
sciousness awakened through the feverish mists of pain 
enough to know that remorse flung her here to perish for 
him, enough by unconsidered impulse to seek to save her 
still. 

" Do not heed her, I say,” his lips breathed hoarsely. 
" She only speaks to spare me ” 

"Ho!” laughed the Calabrian, "how you quarrel for 
the kiss of the lash 1 Now we have you we will keep you — 
both.” 

She turned on him with her old imperious command : 

"You will not dare to take his life ! He is of England 
— not of Italy. Such things as he has done against your 
king and your laws he has done never for himself, only at my 
instance- ” 

"A likely tale, to screen your fellow-rebels, Miladi I 
Tell it to more credulous hearers ” 

" You think that I speak falsely ?” 

For the moment the old glorious challenge of her dis- 
dainful pride beamed from her face ; they who saw it, 
thought, despite themselves, that if this woman were not 
above a lie, then never truth was uttered in this world. 

" It is no matter how you speak,” the Italian made her 
answer; "you are my prisoners. I shall but give you 
over to those who will judge you.” 

" Give me, then. Am 1 not here that you may do your 
worst with me? But by all justice, all mercy, all pity, 
leave him free !” 

" It is impossible I” 

She threw herself before him ; she let her fallen hair 
bathe his feet, she poured out the vivid utterances of an 
eloquence that none ever heard unmoved, she sued to him 
as never for herself would she have sued an emperor ; for 
the only time in her life she abased herself to supplication 
— she to whom the praying of such a prayer was worse 
than the endurance of any chastisement. 

The Calabrian heard her, startled, dazzled, shaken, but 
he would not yield. 


550 


IDALIA. 


“It is too late,” he said, abruptly. “Miladi, why did 
you not think before what serving you might cost to a 
brave man ? You treated him like a dog : well, he must 
die a dog’s death. The blame of it is not mine 

There was a certain pathos in the words ; he was brave 
enough himself to honor the courage he had so mercilessly 
tried ; her head sank as though the rebuke of Deity spoke 
by the rough soldier’s mouth ; she crouched, with a low 
moan like a stricken animal’s, at the foot of the column 
where Erceldoune was bound. 

He turned on her his strained and aching eyes. 

“ Why have you so much mercy on my body ?” 

There was an infinite reproach in the infinite patience 
of the wondering words. Why had she who had slain his 
soul, his spirit, his hope, all in him that made the living of 
his life of any peace, of any worth, thus had mercy on the 
mere torture of limb and nerve and sinew ? Why did she 
who had been so pitiless, so wanton in her cruelty, feel 
compassion and contrition before the coarse, indifferent 
doom of merely physical pain ? 

The Calabrian looked at them in silence, then motioned 
to his men. 

“ Take them from the sun-glare, and bind them together.” 

In a sense he felt pity, because he felt the homage of 
courage to courage, for this man whom he had seen so 
loyal at such awful cost ; but for her he had no emotion, 
save dread of her as a sorceress, save wrath against her for 
one whose fell temptations had been so fatal and so ruthless. 

She made no resistance ; she never felt the grating of 
the leathern thongs upon her wrists ; she had lost all con- 
sciousness of personal suffering ; she had come to deliver 
up her life for his, and the sacrifice was given too late ; 
she had no knowledge left her save this, no heed for what- 
soever they might do to her, though she had given herself 
back to a worse captivity than the prison of the grave. 
As the leash with which the soldiers coupled them like 
hounds was pulled tighter, drawing her wrists together, and 
upward where she was sunk on the parched turf at his feet, 
her hand touched his ; he shuddered as he had never done 
when the mosquito had thrust its sting into his unshielded 
breast. 


“i GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.” 551 

She felt rather than saw that mute agony of the bound, 
defenseless, powerless limbs; it passed through her in ten- 
fold bitterness. This man, who had held himself unworthy 
to touch but the hem of her garment, who had deemed 
himself blessed as with the gift of gods if her eyes but dwelt 
with a smile on his, now shrank from the contact of her 
hand as from pollution, from iniquity. 

“Take me away,” she moaned wearily. “Would you 
chain him to his murderess ?” 

They hesitated, and looked toward their chief. 

“Leave me, and take him down!” she said, with that 
vibration in her voice that scared them like startled sheep. 
“ He dies there, and you have not mercy enough even to 
lift him up one drop of water, even to thrust away one 
sting that fastens on him. He is dying, I say. If you are 
men, and not Sends, unloose him !” 

They had been as Sends in their sport ; the southern 
cruelty that will rend a bird’s wings from its body, or a 
butterfly’s dainty beauty asunder, laughing softly all the 
while, had been awakened in them ; they were loath to 
quit its indulgence. 

He looked as though she said aright, and that he was 
dying lashed there to the column ; his eyes were blood-red, 
his mouth open and swollen, his forehead purple with suf- 
fused blood ; his heart beat visibly, great slow labored 
throbs, under the cords : he was fast losing consciousness. 

She wrenched herself from their hold, and caught the 
wooden cup the soldier had cast down and filled it with 
the water of the stagnant stream, and held it upward to 
his lips ; he quivered from head to foot, and shrank from 
the draught that through the parching heat he had been 
athirst for with so deadly a longing. 

“ Do not torture me — more 1” 

The whisper was almost inarticulate from his dry stiff- 
ened lips; the cup fell from her hold. She knew his mean- 
ing ; she remembered the memory which made the thirst 
that he endured less torture than that action from her 
hand. She turned passionately on the nearest soldiers. 

“ Show some human mercy ! Bind me there in his stead, 
tear me limb from limb as children tear the fire- flies ; it 
will be rarer pastime for you to put a woman to torment I 


552 


ID ALIA. 


You know what manner of thing is justice? Then if you 
do, by every law of justice make me suffer, and spare 
him.” 

Under their drooping lids, his eyes lightened a moment 
with a gleam of consciousness : his instinct was still for 
her defense. 

“ Let me be. So best,” he said faintly. “ It will soon 
end.” 

She was worthless, she had so declared herself; she was 
his traitress and another’s paramour; yet the loyalty in 
him survived still — still to lay his life down for her had its 
sweetuess to him. 

A shrill wailing cry broke from her like that of some 
creature perishing in the trough of waves or under billowy 
flames. 

“ 0 Christ ! have you no pity ? Take him down while 
there is breath in him, and bind me there in his stead. I 
will never bid you spare me one pang 1” 

They looked doubtfully at their chief; he signed them 
to obey her. 

“ She says justly; it is she who ought to suffer. Loose 
him, and bring him out of the sun.” 

They unloosened the knotted cords that swathed his 
limbs to the column ; when they were wholly unfastened 
he swayed forward, his head fell on his breast, his body 
bent like a reed, there was foam upon his beard, and his 
eyes were closed. 

A great stillness came then upon the soldiery about the 
place ; through them, under their breath, they whispered 
that their work was done — that he was dead. 

She alone thought not as they thought, that his sacrifice 
for her was crowned by the last sacrifice of all. 

“ He is not dead,” she said, simply. 

There was a strange calmness and certainty in the words 
that thrilled through those who heard them ; they looked 
at her, neither touching nor opposing her ; she had terror 
for them — terror for them as of some great, fallen, half- 
shameful, and half-glorious thing. Every intense passion 
carries its reaction of fear upon those who witness it; hers 
had such on them now. They dimly felt that if they, in 
their wanton cruelty, had been the actual murderers of this 


“i GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.” 553 


man, she knew herself far more utterly his destroyer than 
they could be, who had but harmed his mortal form. 

“ He is not dead,” she said, with that vibration of an 
exquisite joy crossing the icy desolation of despair, which 
smote the most callous there to some vague sense of un- 
swerving pain ; — as though her voice reached him, he raised 
himself slightly, where two soldiers held up his sinking 
frame, his lips gasped for breath, his eyes unclosed to the 
dazzling gleam of the day, he stood erect, while a loud cry 
broke from him : 

“ O God ! — I cannot die !” 

The English words missed the listening southern ears ; 
<she alone knew the agony in them of the great imperish- 
able strength that would not let life leave him, that would 
survive all which strove to slay it — survive to keep sensa- 
tion, memory, knowledge in him, and to refuse the only 
mercy he could ever know, the mercy of oblivion and an- 
nihilation. 

The Calabrian, who had ordered him this torture, looked 
softened, and went and laid his hand upon his prisoner’s 
shoulder. 

“You are a fine brute. I am sorry you provoked us. 
Sec here — this woman is the guiltier : she says so : she is 
come to suffer in your stead.” 

lie heard, though all his senses still were dim — though 
earth, and sea, and sky, and the ring of the armed men, 
and uer face in the white furnace-heat of the sunlight were 
all one misty blaze of color to him. He heard, and his 
lips moved faintly. 

“ She shall not suffer — for me.” 

So far as thought could be clear to him, he thought that, 
having sinned so deeply against him, remorse at the last 
had struck her, and drawn her to bear witness for him ; he 
thought that there yet dwelt in her too much still of native 
courage, of inborn nobility, to let her rest in safety and 
security, while through her sin, and to give her freedom, he 
endured the doom to which she had cast him out; he 
thought that, so far, she was true to herself, though false 
with worse than a Delilah’s treachery to him. To take 
vengeance upon her was a poor, vain, wretched quittance 
that never glanced by him ; a grossness, a baseness that 


554 


IDALIA. 


could have no place with him ; his great tortured passion 
could no more have slaked itself in such a payment than it 
could have wreaked its wrong by the bruising and the 
marring of that mere loveliness of form which had been 
the lure and instrument of his destruction. 

The Italian swore a heavy oath. 

‘‘Are you mad ? Why, of her own testimony she has 
been your ruin !” 

He saw his captive’s breast heave with a mute, tearless, 
convulsed sob, that no corporeal torment had ever wrung 
from him. 

“ Of a woman’s compassion she says it — out of her own 
mouth you would not condemn her ?” 

It was the sole denial, the sole evasion of the truth that 
ever his voice had spoken. To save himself, he would not 
have borrowed the faintest likeness of a lie ; but in the 
dizzy mists of his reeling senses, in the exhaustion of in- 
tense pain, this one instinct remained with him — to save 
her even from herself, to screen her even from the justice 
that would avenge him. 

As she heard, where she stood bound, held back by the 
guards who had seized her, her eyes met his across the 
breadth that was between them, of hard, hot, white, cruel 
light ; — guilty or guiltless, faithful or faithless, by that 
look he knew that she loved him as no woman will love 
twice. 

His head sank, his eyelids closed, he shivered in the 
scorching day. She loved him, or she had not come thither 
— she loved him, or never that language had burned for 
him in her glance. But this love — love of the traitress, of 
the voluptuous betrayer, of the temptress of sin, of the 
“ queen of evil, lady of lust” — what was this to him ? 

He could have better borne to see her lie dead at his 
feet. 

Some touch of veneration for the courage they had wit- 
nessed, for the self-sacrifice they vaguely understood, had 
come upon the brigands round him — brigands in their 
coarseness, their training, and their brutality, though they 
wore the livery of a monarchy. They had seen that this 
man could hold his own in contest with the strength, and 
the rage, and the prolonged resistance of lions ; they saw 


“i give My body to inherit punishment.” 555 


now that he could suffer and submit with the mute-enduring 
patient self-surrender and seif-command of those saints of 
whom the priests had told them, in their boyhood, dim, 
pathetic, ancient legends, half forgot and half remembered. 
They yielded him a certain, reluctant, wondering homage, 
and they brought him, with more gentle usage, where the 
thickly woven olive and acanthus made a shadow from the 
sun, and gave him water to slake his burning throat, and 
drew the linen folds of his dress over his wounded chest 
with what was, for them, almost tenderness. To her they 
had no such pity ; they knew her a revolutionist, a rebel, 
an infidel — as they were told, a woman of evil, murderous, 
and fearful sorcery, who could revenge with the jettatura 
afl those who incensed her by resisting her seductions; they 
hated her with a great sullen hate, the stronger, because it 
was the barbarous hatred that is born of fear ; but for their 
commander they would have shot her down with a volley 
from their carbines, that those fatal eyes might gaze on 
them no more with the glance that they believed could 
wither them like a sorceress’s incantation. They bound 
her arms behind her with ruthless severity, till her fair skin 
was lacerated and bruised ; then they forced her down on 
to the yellow grasses that grew lank and long among the 
fallen temple-stones, and passed the ropes that bound her 
round a block of travestine : from the moment that she 
had asked for his deliverance, she had never spoken. 

He was so near her that, stretching her hand out had 
she been free, she could have touched him where they had 
laid him down ; his pain-racked limbs were stiff and mo- 
tionless ; he could not have stirred one step to save his 
life ; his frame was racked with cramp, and the virus from 
the insects’ teeth seemed to eat like vitriol into his flesh ; 
his face was buried in the grasses as his forehead rested on 
his arm ; he could not bear to look upon her ; he could 
not bear to feel her gaze was on him. To the watching 
eyes of the soldiers about them, to the certainty of cap- 
tivity, or worse, that waited them they were both uncon- 
scious ; all that either knew was that presence of the other, 
which surpassed any martyrdom to which military and 
priestly power could ever bring them. 

There was silence for some time around ; the chief of 


556 


IDALIA. 


the scanty troop had sent the fleetest runner among them 
northward for orders from the one who, with the warrant 
of his Grace of Villaflor, had the direction of his search 
and the disposition of his prisoners. He was uncertain 
what to do, and whither to take them ; in a thing of so 
much moment he feared to move rashly or wrongly : the 
people were inflamed moreover, the times were rife with 
unrest and sedition, the mouths of the populace were whis- 
pering tales that made the national blood burn hot against 
the Bourbon ; he feared a riot — even it might be a rescue 
— if he bore this woman, to whom his superstition gave 
such spells, and to whom the revolutionists gave such 
homage, in the full noonday captive toward Naples. 

An hour heavily passed by ; round them the soldiers 
were couched, panting, in the heat, but with their look 
watchful as a dog’s, and their cocked carbines slanted to- 
ward those they guarded. Where they had fastened her 
she sat with her head bowed down, and her eyes, that 
burned like fire under their swollen aching lids, fastened 
on him where he lay ; he never stirred, but every now and 
then a great shudder shook his whole frame, though he 
never lifted his face from where it rested on his arms, 
though his limbs felt dead as with the numbness of Arctic 
frost. Fettered, she sat and looked on him — this man, 
who had thought no evil thing could ever come to him, 
once having gained the treasure of her love. He had lost 
all actual knowledge that she was near, in the exhaustion 
that had succeeded to the long strain on every nerve and 
fiber. Delirious teeming fancies swam before his brain 
even in that lethargy of worn-out powers ; in them he had 
no sense of the reality of her presence beside him, but in 
visions he believed he beheld her, the priestess of passion 
and pain, the goddess of darkness and of the spells of the 
senses, whom no man shall worship and live. 

The messenger returned. The answering command was 
whispered by him to his officer. There was noise and 
movement and haste and delay around them under the 
shadow of the aged silver olive-trees. Neither knew nor 
heeded it. Fate had wrought its worst on them. 

The soldiers brought a long low wagon, taken from a 
homestead some way in the interior, oxen drawn, and com- 


“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS I” 551 

monly used to bear the load of millet-sheaves at harvest, 
or the piles of purple fruit at vintage time. They half 
dragged, half lifted him upon the straw within it — with a 
kindly gentleness still, for they pitied him insomuch as he 
had fallen beneath her power, they honored him inso- 
much as their uttermost ingenuity of torture had failed to 
wring from him one moan or oath ; and they roughly mo- 
tioned her to a place beside him, a superstitious terror of 
her keeping their hands from touching, and their tongues 
from offering her insult. She stooped over him where he 
lay, half senseless, on the strewn cornstalks. 

“ O Heaven ! how you suffer !” 

The darkness of his eyes, humid and lusterless, gleamed 
on her a moment under his half-closed lids; he turned with 
restless fever on the straw. 

“ You think this pains ?” 


CHAPTER XXXY. 

“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS !” 

The oxen toiled laboriously on their wearisome way ; 
the wagon jolted on its large unpainted wheels ; the sol- 
diers marched on either side, and in the van and rear : the 
tawny leathern covering flapped idly to and fro, while 
about it clung a faint sweet fragrance from grass crops 
and vine-loads carried through many changing seasons of 
the earth. 

Where they went she had no knowledge ; ihey had 
bound her eyes; that the noon in time passed and the 
cooler day followed she could tell by some diminution in 
the intensity of heat, and by the tender music of birds’ 
throats that every now and then broke out from myrtle 
thickets and lemon-gardens that they wended their way 
through as the hours advanced. The measured march ot 
the men, and of the heavy tread of the cattle, at intervals 
paused ; then she heard the muttering of voices, and some 
47* 


558 


IDALIA. 


change in their guards’ position round the wagon, as though 
uneasiness or insecurity was prevalent among the scanty 
troop. Time seemed endless; but she knew that she might 
easily err in its reckoning, for the oxen moved with great 
tardiness, and neither man nor beast could press on with 
any swiftness till the sun had sunk lower. At her feet 
Erceldoune lay motionless ; she could not see or touch 
him, she would listen for each sigh and catch of the pain- 
ful breath he drew through his aching chest. The exhaus- 
tion which had succeeded to the torment he had undergone 
still lasted; a feverish lethargy held him almost insensible; 
he was conscious of some unrest, of some added pang when 
the uneven rugged roadway shook the laboring wagon, and 
then he turned wearily on the straw beneath him, but to 
greater sensibility he never roused. They had screened 
him from the heat with some broken boughs, and had laid 
some wetted linen on the excoriated skin that their blows 
had bruised, and the gnats had stung ; — the soldiers com- 
passionated him as the prey of the “evil eye.” At times, 
from the weakness that had followed on the ordeal he had 
endured, his breathing and the pulsations of his heart were 
so low that neither could be detected by her eager ear; 
she could not tell whether life had ceased or not, and her 
own heart stood still with a fear that no jeopardy of her 
own life had ever roused in her. And yet — what would 
existence, if it lingered in him, be to him 1 Only exist- 
ence — dragged out at the galley*oar amid the companion- 
ship of felons. Or, — even if his country and his friends 
gained freedom for him, — only one unending misery through 
his memory, through his loss, of her. 

In her despair she strained at the cords that bound her, 
and bent toward him, though her hand could not reach nor 
her lips touch his. 

“ Speak to me ! — for pity’s sake, speak to me !” There 
was no reply ; her voice had ceased to have power to 
rouse him. 

“ Can you not hear me ?” she murmured to him, as that 
horrible stillness froze her blood. “ Oh, by the love you 
have borne me, hear one word, one word only — I have 
never betrayed you 1” 

There was no answer still; sunk in that lifeless languor 


41 X WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS!” 559 


even these words — that came too late — had not the spell 
to wake him. His bodily suffering had conquered his 
bodily strength at last ; he was stretched like a felled tree 
at her feet, and had nor sight, nor hearing, nor any knowl- 
edge of her presence near. 

The escort moved on, on its weary route. 

Through the darkness and the stillness round her the 
sounds of the declining day, that was still bright upon the 
world, came with strange distinctness. The song of a 
child’s voice on the air ; the noise of a water-wheel in a 
stream ; the slow droning notes of monastic bells ; the 
laughter of vinedressers among the budding vines ; the 
mournful chant of a requiem as a village funeral passed 
with the crucifix borne aloft; a thousand murmurs of 
sweet sunlit idyllic life, came on the stilluess with a jarring 
cruelty through the ceaseless tread of the soldiers’ feet, aud 
the slow creaking of the reluctant wheels. 

At length they paused finally. The sun by this was 
sinking low westward. The Calabrian in command touched, 
and bade her descend. She drew back : “ Where he goes, 
I go.” 

She spoke, not with the supplication of a woman who 
loved, to rest near what she loved, but rather with the en- 
treaty of remorse to share the victim’s fate, with the de- 
mand of a leader to endure whatever fell to the lot of one 
who too loyally obeyed such leadership. The soldier 
laughed noisily : 

41 Oh, yes ! you shall have your lover, ’llustrissima. 
Come ! — or it will be worse for him.” 

She obeyed, obliged to be content with such a promise, 
lest the threat against him should be borne out. Her eyes 
were still bound from the light. She heard them lift him 
down from his bed of straw. She thought they bore him 
after her, as heavy steps followed in her rear; and a heavy 
hand thrust her forward down long stone passage-ways. 
Where they had brought her was a large granary, or group 
of store-houses, very lonely, and built strongly in early 
days when the ungathered grain had to be not seldom de- 
fended with a fierce struggle from the raids of foreign 
hands that fought their quarrels out upon Italian soil. 
The building was two-storied, and the vast barn-like chain- 


5G0 


IDALIA. 


bers were of stone, .with slender windows barred with rnsty 
iron, and with a faint dreamy odor in them from sheaves 
of millet stored there, and from a quantity of the boughs 
of the sweet myrtle, which had been cut away to lay clear 
the stems of olives to the air. 

They cut the cord that bound her hands, and left hei 
just within the door as they closed it, and drew the bolts 
without. 

She tore down the bandage that covered her eyes, and 
saw that they had played her false. In the darkened room 
she stood alone. 

For many hours afterward time was a blank to her. 

Whether sleep succeeded to the exhaustion, the endur- 
ance, and the sleepless toil of the past days and nights, or 
whether she again lost consciousness, and lay as in a trance, 
she never knew. The irresistible reaction that follows on 
overwrought excitation came on her. The worn-out limbs 
and the strained nerves succumbed to it, and it stole up- 
ward at length to the brain, and deadened it to all sentient 
life, to all remembrance, to all thought. 

When she awakened, she was lying, thrown forward on 
the heap of dying myrtle. All was intensely still ; through 
the slit of the casement the midnight stars were shining, 
and the hooting of an owl came wailingly on the stillness. 

Her first memory was of him. Her first action was to 
arise and look out on the night. A beautiful country lay 
in the pallor of the young moon’s rays ; she knew the land- 
scape well; it was but few leagues from Naples. Below, 
under some great trees of olive and of lemon, two sentinels 
were pacing with their carbines slanted ; except for their 
measured tread there was no sound. The place was lonely 
and deserted ; the out-building amoDg maze-fields and 
olive-slopes belonging to the Crown. She looked; then 
went back to the couch of withering myrtle, and sought 
to make her thoughts grow clear; and the manifold haz- 
ards and remembrances of her past became of use in 
her extremity. But the task was beyond her strength. 
She was fasting — she was devoured with thirst — she was 
conquered by physical fatigue — she could see, hear, re- 
member, nothing but the face of the man who had been 
willing to perish for her sake, — the gallant beauty bound 


“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS I” 561 

to the stone-shaft, mutilated, bruised, agonized, — the voice 
which yet amid all that torture gave her no reproach more 
bitter than that one rebuke — “Why have you so much 
mercy on my body V 1 She loved him with the voluptuous 
warmth of southern passion ; but she loved him also with 
that power of self-negation which would have made her 
accept any doom for herself, could she thereby have re- 
leased him to freedom and to peace. Her pride of nature, 
her imperial ambitions, her habit of dominion, and her de- 
sire of homage, had given her long a superb egotism, even 
while she had been ever willing to give all she owned for 
the furtherance of lofty aims. But now all heed of herself 
was killed in her ; on her own fate she never cast a thought 
of pity. She had played a great game, won many casts 
in it, and lost the last. That was but the see-saw of life. 
But he — for his loyalty he perished ; for his nobility he 
suffered as felons suffer ; by the very greatness of his faith 
he was betrayed ; by the very purity of his sacrifice he was 
lost forever. 

Time crept darkly on. The odor of the myrtles was like 
the mournful fragrance from flowers strewn upon a coffin. 
From below, the monotonous tread of the slow regular 
steps sounded faintly; in the gloom bats flew to and fro, 
and an owl, who had her nest among the rafters, flittered 
in and out through the bars of the unglazed casement, 
seeking and bringing food for her callow brood. The 
silence was unbroken ; the darkness very heavy, and filled 
with a stealing, sickening sense of unseen life, as rat and 
lizard darted over the stones, and the downy wings of the 
night-birds brushed the air ; she felt as though she should 
lose reason itself in that horrible stillness, that fettered 
misery, that impotent inaction. 

Amid all, there came on her a strange dreamy wonder 
how the life of the world was passing. For twelve days 
she had been as dead as though she had lain in her tomb. 
When they had seized her at Antina, the time had been 
pregnant of great things ; whether they had been brought 
forth or strangled in their birth she could not tell. All 
that had been done among men was a blank to her. 

Then all such memories drifted far from her again. One 
remembrance alone remained — that of the man who suf- 


5G2 


ID ALIA. 


fered his martyrdom for her rather than render rip to jus- 
tice one by whom he believed himself betrayed more foully 
than the sleeping Sisera slain under the sanctity of the 
roof tree. She knew it might well be that never again 
would they look upon each other’s face ; that they might 
drag their lives on asunder, chained apart at the labor of 
felons, with eternal silence betwixt them, and knowiug not 
even when each other’s lives should cease. 

It is a horrible knowledge — that one, living, yet will be 
forever as the dead. 

Fear had never touched her ; yet now a supernatural 
terror seemed to glide into her veins. The black shades 
of the stealing lizards, and the cold touch of the bat’s wing 
as it passed, grew unbearable ; the darkness seemed draw- 
ing in on her closer and closer ; the eyes of the night-birds 
glowed like flame through the gloom ; she uttered a bitter 
cry, and threw herself against the bars, and shook them 
with all the force of despair. “ Let me see him once, that 
he may know 1” she cried out to the peace of the night. 
“ Oh God ! that he may know !” 

The cry, though not the words, was heard. 

The door was unbolted, and opened. The light of a 
lamp fell on the floor. The Calabrian entered. 

“ So ! what is it, Miladi ?” 

He came, careless and ready for a braggart’s insolence. 
She turned her eyes on him, and the look smote him speech- 
less. 

“You played me false,” she said to him. “Where is 
he?” 

He stammered, then was silent. She dazzled and af- 
frighted him, as her sudden apparition had done in the 
blaze of the noonday. He thought coarse and evil things 
against her; he had heard them said, and deemed them 
true; but in her presence, even to think them seemed a 
sacrilege. 

“ Where is he?” she repeated. “Answer me.” 

“He is near you.” He spoke at random; with the 
flicker of the lamp on the scarlet of her dress, and the 
gleam of her loose-hanging hair, her beauty looked to him 
unearthly. 

“ In this building ?” 


“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS!” 563 

“ Yes. You are both — kept here because — until ” 

He stopped confusedly, and bent above the wick of the 
lamp, as though it needed trimming. 

‘•Until what ?” 

“Until the king’s pleasure,” he replied, sullenly. 

She came closer to him. 

“ You are a soldier ?” she asked. 

“Yes.” 

“ Well, then, brave men are commonly pitiful. Let me 
see him for one hour to-night.” 

He would have laughed out a coarse jest ; but as he 
met her look he dared not. 

“Impossible!” he answered, curtly. “No prisoners 
must commune with each other.” 

“I know — I know I” she interrupted him. “But gold 
keys unlock all barriers? I am rich. Name your price. 
You shall have it if you can give me one hour with him.” 

“ Impossible I” he muttered once more. 

“No - possible — if you will do it. What can it harm 
you ? You have both under lock and ward. All I ask is 
a little speech with him. See — I told you I had wronged 
him deeply. Can you not think I want his pardon ?” 

The humility of the words coming from lips so proud, 
and bending a spirit so indomitable, touched the soldier, 
who, under a rough rind, had a certain latent kindliness. 

“ Nay ; I would do it for you if I could out of charity,” 
h j made answer. “ But it is not in my power, I tell you.” 

* It is in your power, if it be in your will. An hour— 
a half hour — but a few moments — and you shall have a 
thousand — five thousand ducats!” 

He looked at her stupefied ; he was avaricious, like most 
Italians. 

“ IIow can you get them ? They will have confiscated 
all you have ?” 

“ In Italy — yes. But that was little. My wealth lies 
elsewhere. I will write you an order on Paris, that will 
give you the sum down in gold. 

“ You speak truth ?” 

'* Did you ever hear that I spoke any other thing ?” 

He laughed. “ Basta, never. They all say that you 
lash king and priest with your tongue ! Well; I will see 
wLat I can do.” 


5C1 


ID ALIA 


He left her ; barring her in. She waited in an anguish 
of dread. She had spoken calmly and briefly to him ; but 
alone, the great veins stood out on her forehead, and her 
limbs shook with the passion of hope and fear. She would 
have laid her head down on a scaffold with the breaking of 
dawn, if to-night she could thereby have purchased the 
power to say but a single word to the mau who believed 
her his traitress. 

Before long the Calabrian returned ; he had nothing of 
the soft grace common to his countrymen ; but he had a 
rough good faith, which, blent with his liking of gold, 
served her better. He held her an inkhorn and a slip of 
paper. 

“ It was a miracle to get these ; I sent to the ostiary 
for them. Write, and you shall see this stricken lion of 
yours ; sure you have wounded him some way worse than 
ever we did ” 

She laid the paper on the stone window-sill, and wrote 
an order for the payment, in Paris, of ten thousand francs 
in her name to his. He read it with the hesitation of a bad 
scholar by the feeble oil light ; then a laugh spread itself 
over all his features. 

“ So ! I have a brother, a singer, in Paris, who will 
serve for this work. It were as much as my life, Miladi, 
were worth for your name and mine to be seen together. 
Come ! you shall go to your comrade ; but, of a surety, 
rich lips like yours might add one another payment V 7 

The indignant blood flushed her face ; but she restrained 
the haughty impulse that moved her. 

“ Brave men do not insult captives who cannot resent,” 
she said, briefly. “ I have fulfilled my bond. Fulfill 
yours. ” 

He hung his head ashamed, and motioned her to pass 
out before him. There was a short broad stone passage, 
with a door at the farther end — the great barn-door of 
another stone chamber. He drew the bars aside, and 
pushed it open, setting his lamp down within the entrance. 
“You shall be alone an hour,” he said, as he closed the 
door afresh, and the bolts rolled back into their places. 

The oil-fed wick shed but a narrow circle of light be- 
neath it ; it did nothing to illumine the impenetrable dark- 


“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOE THIS 1" 565 


ness that lay beyond in the central and distant parts of the 
corn-room ; there was no more sound here than in her own 
prison-place, the same flitting of gray downy wings, the 
same gliding murmur of hidden night-awakened insect life. 
She thought that again the Italian had betrayed her; that 
she was still in solitude. 

But though her eyes could not pierce that dense wall of 
unlightened shadow that fronted her, such light as came 
from the lamp — for here the moon did not shine — was cast 
full about her, and on the dusky scarlet cloud of her dra- 
peries. And on the silence a cry rang that startled all the 
night-birds in their restless flight, circling beneath the 
rafters Unseen himself, he saw her, and deemed it a 
vision of the bitter dreams that swam, as shadows seem to 
swim on waters, through his aching brain. * 

He rose slowly from the straw in which he lay, reeling 
to and fro in his weakness, and came out from the gloom, 
and faced her — silent. 

She looked at him a moment, then fell at his feet 
as she had fallen when he had been bound beneath 
his scourgers. 

He did not move, nor touch her; his eyes were fas- 
tened senselessly upon her ; he shivered as though hot 
iron seared him. 44 Can you not leave me in peace to 
suffer ?” he cried, wildly. 4 ‘ Off — off — off ! What 1 loved 
is dead ! Ay — you tempt me — you bring me her beauty — 
you would give me her kisses, her passion, her sweetness, 
her shame. I will not — I will not ! What I loved is dead. 
I am faithful !” 

All through the hours of the night, dreams of her had 
mocked, and pursued, and tortured, and assailed him ; he 
was drunk as with the fumes of wine with the burning of 
the love that still lived ; his mind, weakened and delirious, 
had only been conscious of phantoms that seemed to 
throng on him, tempting him in a thousand shapes, bind- 
ing him down the slave of his senses, forcing on him joys 
torn out from the hell of guilt. ‘‘What matter what you 
be — what matter what death come by you, so you are 
mine V 9 The old, old subtlety that has tempted all men 
from the first hour that they fell by woman, had besieged 
him through all the lonely watches of the night. Now he 

48 


566 


IDA LI A. 


knew not her living presence from the visions >f his temp- 

tie ss 

In horror she knelt before him. 

“ Hush ! hush ! Ah ! for heaven’s sake, believe my love 
at least, though it has cursed you !” 

He thrust her from him, with the senseless blaze still in 

h!s eyes 

* Love ! Ay, shared with a scare. Love that is poison 
and infamy ; love in my arms to-night, in another’s to- 
morrow ! Oh, I know, I know, — it is sweet, and cruel, 
and rich, and men fail by it and perish through it. But to 
me it were worse than naught. Can you not tell how I 
loved her?” 

The words which had been at first raving and violent, 
sank at last into an infinite weariness and pathos. Tears 
rained down her face as she heard them : never had she 
honored him as she honored him now, when he refused 
subjection to a vile passion, and held her dead to him be- 
cause he held her base with the baseness of deliberate and 
self-chosen vice. 

“ I can tell 1” she murmured “ You love as she merits 
not, nor any woman. Yet, — love further still, and, if you 
can, forgive !” 

He started as the voice thrilled through him, and roused 
his consciousness of some actual life near him. 

“ Forgive ? forgive?” he answered her. “Do you not 
know that what men have to pray for, before women like 
you, is to have the power to hate? Forgive? That were 
sweet as the touch of your kisses ! It is to shun, to abhor, 
to resist you, that strength is needed 1” 

He was not wholly conscious of her presence ; the sense 
that while she had betrayed she yet had borne him a cruel, 
worthless, sensual passion had been forced on him even 
while he had found her sheltering his foe, had been borne 
out by her own words, even by her outbreak of remorse, as 
she had pleaded for his life on the seashore : that sense 
remained with him, and against the weakness in him that 
made such a love even as this look priceless, strove that 
nobler instinct which had governed him when he had said 
to her, “love that is faithless and guilty, — what is that to 
me?” 


“I WOULD IIAYE GIVEN MV SOUL, FOR THIS !” 567 

He had thought that, for her sake, h*- should shrink from 
no crime, that for the guerdon of her beauty there would 
be no guilt before which he would pause ; but even now. m 
the semi-insanity brought on him by the torment through 
which he had passed he was truer to himself than this, and 
the caress of a wanton could never have replaced to him 
the loss of the '‘one loyalty, one faith” of his life He 
would have defended her and cleaved to her in her ex- 
tremity ; and endured in her stead for sake of the imper 
ishable fidelity he had sworn to her; but it would have 
been only when the last thing was done and the last sacri- 
fice rendered, to have put her from him for evermore, and 
never to have looked upon her face again. 

She lay at his leet, and heard him thus abjure her 
power ; thus entreat for force to be blind and dead to the 
allurement of what he deemed the voluptuous visions of 
his cheated passion ; and she honored him as never she had 
honored any living man ; honored the slave, who, because 
his slavery was shame, broke from it, and became her king 
by virtue of the very majesty of that rebellion Snakes 
had crawled and beasts had crouched in human likeness 
many a time before her; this man alone stood before her 
undebased, having rent the withes of base desire, having 
cleaved to the liberty of an unstained honor. 

And her heart went out to him in supplication, remem- 
bering alone the wretchedness that through her had fallen 
on him. 

“ My God, yes ! I have brought you only evil. But 
hear me once before we part forever. Hear me but once, — . 
you perish by me, but I have no guilt to you” 

He breathed loud and hard ; his eyes stared on her in 
the dusky light ; he took but one sense from her words — 
that the infidelity of her life had been against others; that 
though she had lied to him, and beguiled him, and forsaken 
him, against his rival she had done deeper sin than against 
himself. 

“You love me?” he muttered, as he strove to thrust her 
back. “ Be silent, then — Go, go, go ! I have no strength, 
— if once I pardon, never shall I resist you 1” 

Pardon 1 Its softened mercy took the shape of deadliest 
temptation It looked sweet as life to forgive ; — to for- 


B68 


IDALIA. 


give, and steep all wrong, all pain, all hate in one divine 
oblivion ; to forgive, and heed not the pollution of the 
soul, so only the grace and graciousness of mortal form 
were his ; to forgive, and call sin grace, shame honor, and 
treachery truth, if so alone the heaven he had lost were his. 

She rose up, and faced him, silently awhile ; the great 
slow tears swam before her sight; her tongue was stricken 
of its fluency ; she knew that for her, through her, by her, 
this man was condemned to a living death ; yet that it was 
not his lost life but her lost purity which was his despair 
now. 

Then she went to him ere he could repulse her, and laid 
her hands upon his breast, and looked full upward to his 
eyes : and her voice was low, and had a strange sweetness 
in it. 

“When to-night is over we shall never meet again. 
The truth may be told now. I have never betrayed you.” 

A marvelous change passed over his face; the suffering 
and the darkness, and the haggard desolation on it, were 
suddenly crossed as with a golden flash of light. He 
answered her nothing; but his gaze strained down into 
hers as though it read her soul. 

Her hands still leant upon his breast, her eyes still were 
lifted up to his, her voice had still that sweetness, which 
was so calm as with the calmness of those from whom all 
hope has passed, and yet had a yearning piteous passion in 
it that no words could give. 

“ We may speak now as the dying do — you and I — we 
die to-night. To-morrow the living w~orld will have no 
place for us save a prison and a grave. You perish 
through me ; I have killed you. Your murderess — yes ; 
but never your traitress.” 

He trembled through all his limbs under her touch and 
her words ; the breath of her lips seemed to toss his life 
to and fro as the winds play with reeds. His bwn reeled. 
They had said that her voice could steal reason itself from 
those whom it tempted ; they had said that her lie brought 
a thousand times subtler charm of conviction than the 
truth of other women ever bare in it ; at dawn she had 
abased herself in guilt before him ; now, at midni^uU. she 
swore to him that no treachery to him was on her 


“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS!” 5G9 


“ Not. mine I” he echoed. “When my foe is your para- 
mour, my assassin your care ! Silence ! silence ! They 
say that you tempt men till they lose all likeness of them- 
selves — all power to see you as you are ; but you died to 
me forever when you owned yourself dishonored !” 

“ Wait ! At dawn you gave me your pity i” 

“ Pity ! pity I God ! you know what a man’s passion 
is 1” he cried to her. “ Can it yield that cold, merciful, 
sinless thing when it consumes itself in hell fire ? Pity ! 
— what pit y had you ?” 

It was the sole reproach he had cast at her. 

“Ah 1 hear me, only hear me 1 To you I had no 
sin ! ” 

lie gave but one meaning to her answer ; a bitter moan 
broke from him ; for an instant his arms touched her to 
draw her once more to his embrace, then they fell as 
though nerveless and useless. 

“ Then — you had sin to another. I have not the 
strength I thought ; I cannot pardon to the uttermost. I 
would not forsake you ; I would not harm you. But the 
woman 1 loved is dead, I say ; do not bring me in mock- 
ery of her — a courtesan.” 

The words were incoherent and faint ; but they had an 
exceeding pathos ; the longing, aching melancholy of a 
life henceforth without one hope. Her very heart seemed 
to break as she heard them, as they strove after justice 
and tenderness to her, even amid the havoc of his shat- 
tered faith, his unutterable desolation. 

“Listen !” she answered him. “I bring you a woman 
who sinned, if ambition were sin ; if too little mercy were 
sin ; if imperious pride and cruel victory were sin ; if evil 
fellowship and enforced sufferance of alien crime were sin; 
but of all other I am innocent.” 

His hands fell heavily on her shoulders, in the dim light 
that flickered on the paleness of her face ; his own was 
wholly in darkness ; but through the gloom his eyes burned 
down upon hers with the glare of wildly- wakening hope 
straining through the belief — by her own lips — of her 
guilt. 

“ Innocent ! When you are his mistress !” 

“ I am not his — nor any man’s.” 

48* 


570 


IDALIA. 


“A b, God ! Take care how you betray me afresh. I 
am mad, I think, to-night.” 

“ I do not betray you. I have never betrayed. I left 
you to believe me dishonored, lest worse should come 
unto you.” 

“ What ! when you loved him !” 

“ I loved him in childhood — yes. Then only.” 

“ In childhood ! What are you to him ?” 

“Wait! — wait! It sickens me to tell! Out of the 
greatness of your own heart you judged my life — you 
judged it rightly ” 

“ What are you to him ?” 

“ To my eternal shame — his daughter !” 

Her head was sunk down on the stone floor of the 
prison-chamber as the words left her, slowly, unwillingly, 
as though her existence itself were torn and dragged out 
with them ; to the woman who had the pride of an impe- 
rial blood, with all the superb insolence of beauty, genius, 
and power, without their peer, it was humiliation, as deep 
as to lay bare a felon’s brand, to own her kinship with 
crime and with cowardice, to yield up the secret disgrace 
of her mighty race. 

He — dead to all else — heard but the answer that gave 
her back to him ; doubted not, questioned not, paused not 
for proof or for dread, but with a great cry — the cry of a 
heart that was breaking with rapture — stretched out his 
lacerated arms, and drew her up to his embrace, and 
crushed her close against his bruised and aching breast. 

“God forgive me that ever I believed even your own 
voice against you ! God forgive me that I wronged you !” 

His words rang clear and loud, and sweet as clarion’s 
ring in his unutterable joy. Then his head sank, his 
wounded limbs failed him, ecstasy vanquished his strength 
as never wretchedness had done ; for the first time in all 
his years of manhood he bowed himself down and wept as 
women weep, with the agony of passion, with the abandon- 
ment of childhood. 

Jfc J(£ i(s 5|i :fc # 

Not until long after were other words uttered between 
them. The first that were spoken were hers, while the 
pulse of her heart beat on his, and the low flame of the 
lamp sunk out slowly. 


“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS!” 571 

“ What use ! what use that you know the truth !” she 
moaned. “ You have been martyred for me. Through me 
you will perish !” 

He smiled, as men smile in some sweet fancy of dreaming 
sleep. 

“ Though I may die with the dawn, I can thank God 
now I have lived.” 

“Lived to be cursed by me !” 

“Lived to be loved by you ; — it is enough.” 

“ Loved by a love that destroys you ! Can you ever 
forgive ?” 

“ Forgive ? What is left to forgive, since you are 
mine ?” 

“Yours — for your ruin, your torture, your slaughter! 
These are the love gifts I bring you !” 

“Think not of them ! Lift your lips to mine and they 
are forgotten !” 

His thoughts held no other thing, his consciousness 
grasped no other reality, than this one living priceless 
surety of her , that came home to his heart, beyond doubt, 
beyond suspicion, with all the divine force of a resistless 
truth. Memories of evil and of crime floated, shapeless, 
amid the sudden glory that seemed to fill the gloom of his 
midnight prison with the glow of a southern dawn : he let 
them pass, — he could not hold them. She unloosed herself 
from his arms, and knelt once more beside him, so that, in 
the dim shadowy rays of the lamp he could only see the 
paleness of her upturned brow. She longed to be shel- 
tered even from his sight, in that hour. She had no fear 
but that the greatness of his nature would reach to mercy 
and to pardon. She knew that justice to the uttermost, 
and an infinite tenderness, would ever be hers at his hands. 
But none the less she knew that through her he would per- 
ish; and none the less were the shame that she must reveal 
against her race, the taint of cowardly crime that must rest 
on her by implication, the degradation of her name that 
she must lay bare before him, bitter beyond all bitterness 
to the pride that was born at once of royalty and freedom, 
to the courage that would have faced a thousand deaths 
rather than have bent down to one act of baseness. 

“Forgotten ?” she echoed, where she bowed herself at 


ID ALIA. 


*>'; 2 

hit* feet. “ You are wronged so deeply, that no love but 
yours could ever outlive such wrong. Listen ! I have 
spoken but truth to you. I have striven to save you with 
all the might that was in me. I have never been false 'o 
you by deed, or word, or thought. But — all the same — 
your life is lost through me; and in me you see the daugh- 
ter of your vilest foe, of the man who shot you down with 
h brigand s murder and a coward’s secrecy. Yes! I ! — ■ 
I ! — I ! — who believed no empress never had wider reign, 
who have treated men as dogs beneath my feet, who have 
told you the legends that gave me heroes’ and sovereigns’ 
blood in my veins; — I have greater shame upon me thau 
the poorest serf that ever crawled to take bread at my 
gates. I am the associate and the accomplice of an assas^ 
sin. I am the daughter of Conrad Phaulcon.” 

He heard ; and the words carried their way to his mind, 
that had been delirious with the weight, and now was giddy 
with the release, of pain. He heard ; and the violence of 
the hatred he had borne this man shook him afresh, as tem- 
pests shake strong trees. He breathed slowly and heavily. 
With the rich liberty of his arisen joy came a deadly and 
heartsick oppression ; with the sweet daylight of his re- 
newed faith came the poison-mists of a dead crime. 

“ My God ! — how you must have suffered !” 

The suffering that such a tie as this had cost her was his 
first thought ; before all other. 

“ You think of me, and for me still — still 1” 

“ When I shall have ceased to think of you, I shall have 
ceased to live.” 

Burning tears fell from her eyes upon his hands. She 
w r ould not let him raise her nearer him, but knelt there 
where the faint and gold-hued light of the dying lamp 
strayed softly to her, and fell upon her head like a halo of 
martyrdom in the pictures of old masters. He stooped to 
her. 

“ Tell me all.” 

“All my shame ?” 

“Not yours; you had no share in it, or you would not 
kneel there to-night.” 

“Yes, mine ; for the shame of one man is the shame of 
his race and the evil that is shielded is. shared.” 


rx I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MV SOUL FOR THIS !” 573 

She felt him shudder for one moment from her. 

“ Stay ! You were never leagued with that infamy?” 

'‘Against your life ? No. I suspected — I feared — but 
they dreaded me, and hid it from me. Once I brought it 
against him, and he swore by the memory of my mother 
that he was innocent. This one oath he had used to hold 
sacred. By it he duped me — that once.” 

A hate, unforgiving and deadly, ran through the thrill 
of the words. In the sight of her fearless eyes the one 
unpardonable guilt was the dastardly guilt of a lie. 

'• Tell you all ?” she pursued, while her voice rose swifter, 
and gathered the fluent eloquence which was natural to 
her as its warmth to the sun “ In years I could not ! Tell 
the torture of that companionship I have endured so long ? 
Ah ! you must paint it to yourself; no words of mine 
could give it. Look 1 I am brave, I am born linked with 
a coward ; I am proud, I have been bound to a man who 
never knew what it was to wince under the lash of dis- 
honor ; I am ambitious, and I have been leashed with an 
adventurer whom the whole continent brands as a knave ; 
I have loved truth and the people’s rights — it is all that 
has redeemed me — and I have been fastened hand and foot 
to the baseness of intrigue, the venality of mock patriot- 
ism, the criminal craft of secret societies. Look ! That 
man could hear what you called me and deemed me a few 
hours ago ; and he could hold his peace, and laugh, and 
never breathe one word, or strike one blow r , to defend my 
honor, to redeem my name. That will tell you what his 
life has been.” • 

A bitter curse moved his lips as he heard. 

“Why did you stay me when my hand was on his 
throat ?” 

“ Could his guilt annul his tie to me ? By that one bond 
he has claime^his immunity, and enforced my forbearance, 
through all the evil of his years.” 

“ Yet, — why not have told me ?” 

“ Because I was bound to silence by my oath. Look ! I 
told you how my early life was spent, but I could not tell 
you the influence Conrad Phaulcon had on it. My mother 
died while I was in infancy. She was the love of his 
youth, and she had passed away from him ere she had 


5Y4 


ID ALIA. 


worn that love out. There are green places which neve* 
wither in the hearts that are searest ; such was her memory 
to him. But her ra3e he hated with a reckless hatred ; ho 
had looked to share their dominion when he wedded her, 
but there was feud between him and Julian. And Julian 
read him aright, and held him in distrust, and none of their 
wealth came to him, and he hated their greatness with a 
bitter envy. I have had him curse my face because it was 
like the Byzantine line ; yet, on the whole, he loved, and 
was gentle to me. And I — I thought him a god, a hero, 
a patriot. He was a communist, an agitator, an adven- 
turer ; but I knew none of those names. I thought mankind 
was divided into the oppressors and the oppressed, into the 
haters and the lovers of liberty, and I revered him as a 
Gracchus, a Drusus, an Aristogiton, stoned by the nation’s 
ingratitude ! Once he was proscribed, and I knew where 
he lay hid, though I was but a few summers old, and they 
took and starved me to make me speak. Because the food 
would not tempt me, they tried blows ; and when I still 
kept silent, they wondered, and at last let me go, because 
one of their patriarchs reproved them, saying I was more 
faithful to man than they were to God.” 

“And he knew that you — his young child — suffered that 
for him ?” 

“ Surely he knew it, later, in Athens.” 

“And it failed to make you sacred in his sight ?” 

“Nay, it only showed him that I was perhaps of the 
steel that would furnish him forth a choice weapon ! I 
was proud to suffer for him; I adored him then; and 
chiefly of all because I believed him sworn to the peoples’ 
gcod, and a martyr for the sake of freedom. While I was 
still so young those things were still so close at my heart ! 
And he loved me in answer then, though I saw him sel- 
dom, and might have lived on charity but lpr Julian Yas- 
saiis; then, and until the time came when, there being no 
male of the great Byzantine race left, 1 succeeded to the 
whole of its splendor, and, by the will of the dead chief, 
bore its name. From that moment the hate his foiled am- 
bition and his cheated avarice bore against the Vassalis 
line blent against me with the old tenderness that he bore 
me, and from that moment he saw in me only — his prey.” 


“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS!” 5?5 

She felt his hands clinch ; she heard his breath catch 
on passionate words of imprecation. 

“Ah, peace, peace !” she murmured to him. “Aid me 
rather to forgive — if I can. My own wrongs I might, 
but yours ” 

“ Nay, mine are but of the hour, yours are lifelong. 
Tell me all — all. ,? 

“I could not if I spoke for years I % A brave nature 
bound to a coward, a proud one leashed with dishonor — 
that is an agony that lies beyond words. When he saw 
me thus, so young, given this wealth and this power he 
had so vainly desired, a desire of vengeance entered him 
against me ; and also, with the craft of his school, he saw 
in me a fitting instrument for his many schemes. Well he 
knew his sway over me ; Julian dead, there remained none 
to counteract it. A revolutionist ere I could reason, and 
ambitious with an ambition far outleaping all the goals of 
the modern world, a child still in my ignorance of actual 
things and my belief in the omnipotence of truth, yet 
already mistress of what seemed to me the magnificence 
and the dominion of a Cleopatra, I came to his snare as a 
bird to the fowler’s. I would have gone to martyrdom to 
have liberated the nations ; I would have sold my soul to 
have reached the sovereignty of a Semiramis. By these 
twain — my strength and my weakness — he ruled me. And 
through them, in all that glorious faith of my youth, he 
bound me by oath to himself and his cause. That oath I 
have never broken. ” 

There was silence for many moments. Then she spoke 
again, while the dying lamp sunk lower and lower, and the 
halo ceased to fall upon her brow. 

“ Many besides me, unseen of men, wear those secret 
fetters of political oaths sworn in the rashness of their 
youth and faith to what they believed the cause of free- 
dom — to what too late they know an inexorable and ex- 
tortionate tyranny that through all their after-lives will 
never spare. While I thought myself an empress they 
were fastened round me, and made me a slave. Ah ! I 
cannot travel back over that waste of years ! It is enough 
that I swore fealty to his cause and obedience to his order 
— that I swore, moreover, adhesion with him in all things, 


516 


IDA LI a. 


and secrecy upon the tie he bore me. This last thing I 
vowed because he willed it — it was easy to maintain. His 
marriage had long been concealed from fear of the Yas- 
salis’ wrath ; and when the world knew me, I bore another 
title than his. Too late I learned what this fatal exaction 
cost me. Had I been known as his daughter, the evil 
notoriety he had gained would have sufficed to blemish my 
own repute. Asf it was, I might as well have come forth 
from a lazar-house or a felon’s cell. None knew his tie to 
me, except of late years, the traitor who taught you to 
see in him my lover, my accomplice. True, my riches, my 
youth, my ancient name, my brilliancy and extravagance 
of life — other gifts that men saw in me — all brought me 
celebrity, notoriety, triumphs — such as they were. But 
from the first to the last — companioned by him — they were 
darkened by falsehood. And he — ah ! you may well ask 
if a man’s heart ever beat, if a man’s blood ever glowed in 
"him ! — knew it, knew it long ere ever I dreamt it, and let 
the shadow of his own evil fame be upon me, because, 
through it, his schemes were best served ; because, by it, 
he could best secure what no other should ever share with 
him — the wealth that I held and he coveted. He feared 
that I might one day break from him, that I might one 
day give the love I give you. So he desired men to think 
me worthless as they w r ould, and his presence beside me 
sufficed to fulfill his desire ! No, no ! do not pour on me 
those noble words, I am not worthy of them. Though 
sinned against, I am not sinless. When too late I saw 
what my fatal promise had wrought for me. I was in love 
with the dangers, the victories, the sway, the intoleration 
I had plunged into ; I had drunk so deep and so freshly 
of the draught of Power, I could not have laid down the 
cup though I had known there was death in it. And — 
under scorn and hate, and all the unutterable misery that 
came to me when I saw myself betrayed by him — my very 
nature changed. I grew hardened, reckless, pitiless. My 
loyalty to liberty, to truth, to the peoples, never altered ; 
but that was all the better thing left in me. I remained 
faithful, even to a traitor. But the world and I were for- 
ever at war. I cared not how I struck, so that 1 only 
struck home. Evil had been spoken against me falsely, 


“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS!” 5?! 

and I lived in such fashion that they should know one 
woman at least breathed whose neck could not be bent, 
nor whose spirit bowed by calumny. Men came about me, 
mad for the smile of my lips, but not true enough in them- 
selves, as you were true, to pierce to the truth in me, and 
I gave them a bitter chastisement for their blindness: 1 
slew them with their own steel. But — oh God ! what 
avail to tell you this ? I can tell you how that which was 
spoken against me has, in part, been truth deserved, and, 
in part, the malignant coinage of envy. I can tell you 
that at dawn to-day I had no choice but to leave myself a 
traitress in your sight, or see you slaughtered by him as 
the issue of my love. I can tell you this— but what avail ? 
You perish through me, for me, by me ! What use that 
you should hold me faithful to you ? I am none the less 
your murderess because I would give my life for yours, my 
love, my love, my love !” 

Her voice that had been sustained and eloquent with the 
vital strength of remembered wrongs, failed her over the 
last words. The memory of the martyrdom which he had 
borne for her ; the memory of the destruction of all his 
future, which through her befell him ; the memory of the 
only existence that could ever, now be his dragged out be- 
neath the galley-chains, and companioned by the worst of 
criminals, alone remained with her. Guilty or guiltless, 
faithless or faithful, having cleaved to him or having for- 
saken him, — what mattered it ? Wherein could it serve 
him ? He was lost through her. 

But this thought never came to him. His eyes looked 
down on her through the heavy shadow with a light in 
them that had the sweetness of release, the glory of vic- 
tory through all the infinite pain and hopelessness of their 
fated love. 

“ What avail ?” he answered her. “ Ho you know me 
yet so little ? Bo you not know that I could lie down 
and die content, since I have heard that you are sin- 
less ?” 

“ I know, I know ! You would have died for me when 
you thought me vile with the vice that I cherished, branded 
with the kisses of shame. And yet — is there no doubt 
with you now ?” 

2 M 


49 


578 


IDALIA. 


“ Doubt ? Did ever I harbor it save at your own bid* 
ding ?” 

“Yet — what have you but my word, the word which 
that Iscariot told you was only a dulcet lie, soft and false 
on every ear ?” 

She felt the tremor of his passion run through all his 
limbs. 

“ Were I free but for one hour- ” 

^Be at peace. I have given him to vengeance.” 

Her voice had in it that strong immutable merciless ven- 
geance that came to her with her eastern blood ; that 
smote rarely, but when it smote, never wavered and never 
failed. Then her voice fell, hot tears dropped from her 
aching eyes, and she refused to be lifted to his heart, she 
shrank from his hand as though unworthy of its touch. 

“ Vengeance 1” she moaned, “what use is it to me? 
You are lost through me — lost forever ! You pity, honor, 
love me still 1 I could better bear your curse !” 

In the darkness that was about them, she rather felt 
than saw the infinite tenderness of his eyes as they gazed 
down on her : 

“Hush I Would you wrong me still? Can you not 
think one hour that lays your heart bare to me thus, and 
brings me thus the surety of your sinlessness, is wcrth to 
me a lifetime of common joy and soulless pleasure ? Let 
its cost be what it will — it is well bought.” 

She knew he held it so ; and for this, that he loved her 
with this exceeding holiness of love ; for this, that the res- 
toration of her nobility and honor in his sight was price- 
less to him, as no paradise purchased by her crime could 
ever have been ; for this, the woe that she had wrought 
him, eat like iron into her soul. 

“ Well bought ! It will be bought by a living agony of 
endless years ! Manhood, pride, peace, joy, all killed in 
you ; your very name lost, your very fate forgotten, till 
your hair is white with sorrow and your eyes are blind 
with age ! Ah, God ! what matter what I be 1 It is I 
who have condemned you to this ! It is I who have been 
your ruin !” 

His arms drew her upward, close against the heart that 
only beat for her ; his hot lips quivered on her own ; in 


“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS !” 5f9 

the night-silence and the darkness that was on them his 
voice thrilled through her “ sweet as remembered kisses 
after death.” 

“ Do you think they shall ever part us now ? Death 
shall unite us, if Life cannot.” 

The hours passed, and they were left in solitude. As 
they had forgot all other life save their own, so by it they 
seemed forgotten. Through the heavy masonry of the 
iron-bound walls, no echo of the world without came to 
them ; on the hush and the gloom of the chamber there 
was no sound, save only the soft gliding of a night-bird’s 
restless wing. Whatever fate rose for them with the dawn, 
this night at least was theirs : there is no love like that 
which lives victorious even beneath the shadow of death ; 
there is no joy like that which finds its paradise even amid 
the cruelty of pain, the fierce long struggle of despair. 

Never is the voluptuous glory of the sun so deep, so 
rich, as when its last excess of light burns above the purple 
edge of the tempest-cloud that soars upward to cover and 
devour it. 

The hours passed, and the rays of the morning slowly 
stole inward through the narrow casement, bedded high 
above in the granite-blocks, while with the coming of the 
day the birds of the night returned from their outward 
flight, and nestled in their dark haunts with their eyes hid 
beneath their wings. As the first light touched her brow, 
— and the dawn came not there till the day was full-risen 
for the earth without, — she smiled in his eyes, and loosened 
from her bosom the slender steel blade, scarce broader than 
a needle’s width, that had rested there so long. 

“ Take it. You have said — they shall not part us now.” 

His hand closed on it while his smile answered hers. 

“ I will find strength enough for that ; — it shall give us 
eternal liberty, eternal union.” 

Once before he had pledged this promise to her. And 
as she had known then, so she knew now, that he would 
find strength to deliver her from dishonor and himself from 
captivity; strength to be true to her, even to the last 
thing of all. 

Having reached the supreme ecstasy and the supreme 


580 


ID ALIA. 


anguish of life, death was to them, as to the races of the 
young world, the god of deep benignant eyes, whose touch 
was release, and whose kingdom was freedom, on whose 
face was light, and in whose hands was balm. 

Even as the words left his lips, on the quiet of the air 
a single shot rang. 

The first sunbeam had slanted through the slender chink 
above ; the stillness was intense ; far below the measured 
step of the sentinel fell muffled on the turf, and the liquid 
stealing music of water, that fell down through thick 
acanthus foliage without, alone was dimly heard. At that 
moment, as the brightness of the day reached high enough 
to enter the vaulted chamber of the upper story of the 
granary, the stillness was thus broken. There was a stifled 
cry ; then silence reigned again ; and on that silence there 
w r as heard no more the monotonous tread to and fro of the 
soldier on guard. 

He started to his feet, his hand on the Venetian steel he 
had just grasped. 

“ The man is shot !” 

His voice was low and rapid, his eyes turned on hers 
with the same thought which came to both alike. There 
were those in that world they had lost who would have 
done all that courage and true friendship could in their 
service had they known of their extremity ; there were 
men by the score who would have let their lives be mowed 
down like the millet sheaves around them in her cause, 
had they had power to reach her from the grip of priest 
and king. 

Hope had been dead in them. 

In the lowest depths of woe the oblivion of passion had 
made them senseless to all else— senseless even to the fate 
that must await them with the awakening of the dawn. 
But no thought of deliverance had ever come to them. It 
had seemed meet that their lives should end, once having 
reached the deepest joy that life could hold ; joy taken 
from the very jaws of the grave; joy burning through the 
frozen chillness of despair. 

Yet now, when hope, vague as remembered dreams, 
once touched them, they felt drunk with it as with the 
fumes of wine. 


“i WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS I” 58x 

They listened, as none ever listen save those on whose 
straining ear the first sound that falls will bring the mes- 
sage of death or life. 

For a moment that hushed stillness lasted, unbroken 
now by even the treading of the soldier’s feet. Then there 
broke forth the loud rejoicing bay of a hound loosed on to 
his quarry : shot answered shot, steel clashed on steel : 
the din of tumult filled the soft peace of the early day ; 
the old-remembered rallying words that had so often floated 
to her ear above the din of conflict, vibrated on it dqw — - 
“Italia!” “Idalia 1” — the two names blent in one. 

As she heard, she rose erect ; her whole frame seamed 
to strain upward to the sun that glanced through the high 
bars of their prison-room ; there were fire in her eyes, 
light on her lips, the glow of liberty on all her face and 
form. She was the living symbol of Italy unchained. 

“ Do you hear ? Do you hear V 1 she cried to him. 
“She is free !” 

Before her own freedom — even before his — the libera- 
tion of the nation, so long enslaved, came to her heart 
first ; then, while the great tears coursed down her cheeks, 
she clung to him, trembling with a terror that had never 
touched her fearless life — the terror lest for him, as for the 
land for which she had so long endured and suffered, this 
hope only dawned again to die out in endless night. 

“Ah, God ! give them strength — courage — victory!” 
she prayed, as she lifted her face to the sun. “My love, 
my love ! listen for me, listen ! I cannot hear. Hope 
kills me — hope for you !” 

They stood there, barred in, in the shadows which that 
ray of wandering sunlight on high alone parted, while be- 
neath them unseen raged the struggle on which their lives 
hung. Confused, broken, indistinct, the echoes of the con- 
test came strangely through the hushed prison-chamber. 
The bitter riot of war tossed to and fro the fate of their 
coming years ; the balance of chance swung, holding their 
destiny, and they could not tell to which side the scale was 
swaying ; the measure of blood would be the purchase-coin 
of their ransom, or the price of their bondage, and they 
could not know whether foe or friend now claimed it. The*? 
etood, locked in, in solitude, with but a hand’s-breadth 
49* 


582 


ID ALIA. 


the morning sky through the grating above their heads 
the only thing visible of all the living world without, and 
heard the tumult striving far beneath upon whose issue all 
their future hung. 

The time was very brief; a little bird upon an ivy-coil 
outside the window-bars, had lifted its voice in daylight- 
song as the first shots were fired, and still was singing 
softly and joyously, untired ; but to them the moments 
seemed as years. At last, loud and rejoicing on the sum- 
mer air, wild vivas broke 'the bitter noise of conflict, and 
crossed the moans of fallen men ; the dropping shots grew 
fewer and fewer. Upon the stone stairway the rapid up- 
ward rush of feet came near ; the bolts were drawn back, 
the door was flung aside ; with his flanks white with foam, 
and his mighty jaws crimson with gore, the great dog 
sprang on her with a single bound ; behind him, upon the 
threshold, stood Conrad Phaulcon. 

His eyes met theirs one instant; then headlong at her 
feet he fell, a deep, slow stream of blood staining the gray 
stone of the floor. 

Thus at last he met his foe. Thus at last his foe looked 
on him after the weary search of baffled vengeance, long 
and hot as tiger’s thirst. 

As he fell his hands caught the hem of her dress. 

“Idalia! Idalia! ” 

The word died as his head smote the granite, and the 
broken sword he had pressed into his side to lend him 
strength for a moment pierced farther, driven in by the 
weight of the fall. 

Erceldoune staggered forward and raised him. 

‘‘He is dying 1” he said, as he looked at her. There 
came upon him a strange awe as he saw the death that at 
dawn he had so nearly dealt, smite thus, as another day 
broke on the world, the man from whom he had fled, as 
David from the sight of Saul, lest murder should be upon 
his head if longer he lingered where his enemy lay. 

She never spoke, but sank on her knees beside her 
father where he had fallen, held up in the arms that a score 
of hours before had flung him upward like some worthless 
driftwood to be cast into the flames. Her eyes were fast- 
ened on his flushed and haggard face, that still had so 
much left of the old bright classic beauty. 


"l WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOU! FOR THIS I” 583 

“ You have saved us ! You !’* 

She doubted her own senses; she thought she dreamt 
as madly as though she were dreaming that the heavens 
opened and the angels and archangels of medieval story 
descended with the sword of Michael, with the spear of 
Ithuriel, to their rescue. 

He drew his breath with a great sigh, and his voice 
came in broken whispers. 

“You said right — there are things gods would not 
pardon, — your wrongs are of them. You stung me at 
last I” 

She did not answer ; she gazed at him with blind tear- 
less eyes that saw his face, but only saw it as in the mists 
of dreams. 

He pressed the sword that had broken off in his loins 
closer and harder to stanch the blood, while his voice rose 
ringing and resonant. 

44 Our day has come ! They have Palermo ; Naples must 
follow. The king has enough to do to think of his capital. 
They fear the news should get to the populace. We have 
done a bold stroke to-day ; they have been hunting us down 
like wolves, but we have turned and torn them. The senti- 
nel killed, the rest was easy. Ah ! look you, — there Is 
vengeance for you too. That white-faced Northerner be- 
trayed you to Giulio Villaflor. Well, the boyBerto caught 
him in his own toils. They hold him safe ; they will kill 
him like a cur at your word. Ah, Christ! how the steel 
pierces ! I would not die if I could help it. Not just now 
— not till I have seen that traitor’s face. It is hard — hard 
— hard. He has cut and galled me so often ; to die just 
when I could pay him all 1” 

The ferocious words gave way as his breath caught 
them ; he moved restlessly, driving the blade in still, so 
that by this means he might yet gain a moment’s force. 
As his wandering glazing eyes glanced upward he saw 
whose arms supported him ; and the old relentless hate 
glowed in them — dark and deathless. 

44 So ! he has his vengeance, and I am balked of mine ! 
Lay me down, signore. I would sooner die a minute 
earlier than gain the minute by your help.” 

The old savage tiger lust was in the words. Erceldoune 


584 


ID ALIA. 


never heeded them, he rested the Greek’s head on his own 
breast, and held him upward with gentleness and in 
silence. 

Idalia hung over him with one prayer only on her lips* 
one command only in her voice. 

“ Tell him — tell him 1 If you would atone for your sin 
— if you would redeem your infamy — if you have ever 
known remorse — bear me witness what you are to me I” 

The evil faded off his face ; a softer look came back 
there. 

“ Late — late — late !” he sighed : yet he lifted his head 
and made the sign of the cross with that latent superstition 
which lingered in him even while he made reckless jest of 
Deity, and denied with flippant laughter man’s dreaming 
hope of God. 

“By her mother’s memory I swear, — Idalia Vassalis is 
my daughter. To her most bitter calamity. Those who 
have spoken evil against her have lied. I have been a 
coward, a traitor, a shame, and a darkness forever on her 
path ; but — she has ever been loyal to me. She never 
feared, and she was never faithless ; I loved her for that ; 
but, — for that too, — I hated her.” 

As the words, more vivid in the southern tongue he 
used, left his lips firmly and distinctly, her eyes filled 
slowly with tears, and across the stricken form of the 
wounded man, met those which had seen her aright 
through all the mists of calumny, which had looked down 
through the shadows of doubt, and read, despite them, 
the veiled truth of her life. The faith in him had been 
sore tried; but at length, after many days, his reward 
came. 

Neither spoke. That one look uttered all between them. 
Conrad Phaulcon pressed his hand closer yet upon the 
jagged steel that for a few brief moments still could thus 
hold life in him. Something of his old laugh hovered on 
his lips. 

“ Look ! I make a fair ending. Pity there is no priest 
to crow above me. Death-bed repentance ! — there is no 
coin like it ; you sell the game you have lost already, and 
you buy such a fine aroma for nothing ” 

She shivered at the awful mirth as she stooped to him, 
and passed her hand over his forehead. 


“i WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS!” 585 


“ Silence ! Live rather to repent I He will forgive ; 
and I — you have tried my mercy long, you need not fear it 
now.” 

“ No,” he muttered, more huskily, more faintly. “ If 
you had been willing to take your vengeance you could — 
long ago — you knew what would have sent me to the gal- 
leys. But you were true to your word. Strange, strange 
enough ! You were so bold, so careless, so proud, so reck- 
less ; but one could hold you in a bridle of iron, if once 
you had given your word !” 

His sight, that was beginning to fail him, sought her 
face with a wondering, baffled glance ; through whole life 
this loyalty to her pledged honor had bewildered him, even 
while by it he had found so merciless a power to bind and 
to drive one whom fear could never have swayed, nor force 
have moved. As she heard, she lost remembrance of the 
deadly wrongs done against her by the man who should 
have been her foremost guard, her surest friend ; all the 
long years through which he had persecuted and poisoned 
her freedom and her fame fell from her ; lying, in his last 
hour at her feet, having thus at last, however late, however 
slightly, redeemed the cruelty of his past against her, he 
brought to her but one memory ; — that of a long perished 
time, when on her childish ear his voice had come like 
music, breathing the poetry and the heroism of the world’s 
dead youth. 

“ Be more just to us both !” she murmured, while the 
salt drops fell from her eyes upon his brow. “What I 
remembered always was what you at last remember too, — 
the love you bore my mother, the love she gave to you. 
Let it bring peace at last between us.” 

He shuddered as she spoke. 

“God! If priests’ and women’s tales be true, and she 
lives in another life ! I would go to hell, if a hell there 
were, sooner than see her face, — sooner than hear her ask 
of you at my hands.” 

“ Hush 1 Have I not said I forgive?” 

Tne soft and solemn cadence of the mournful words 
seemed to fall upon his ear with a deep calm he dared not, 
or cared not to break ; he lay silent some moments, breath- 
ing heavily, while his drooped lids hung as though in 


586 


IDALIA. 


sleep ; then with a sudden upleaping of the vivid life 
within him, he raised himself once more, while the careless 
melody of his sweet laugh echoed with its old chime through 
the air. 

“ 1 have been a coward all my life. Well — I will die 
like a hero. They will make me a martyr when I am gone ! 
Why not ? Let my epitaph lie as it will, it cannot lie like 
a priest’s or a king’s ! So this is the end of it all ; the 
drama is not worth the playing. They have taken Palermo, 
I tell you ; — Well 1 they revile us, but after all, we have 
truth in us ; the people will see that one day. The capital 
is all in confusion. They could only leave you a half- 
dozen guards. Lousada and Veni, and a few others, 
thought we could do something if we struck well, — they 
have got a brigantine too, — if you flj at once, you will be 
safe.” 

The incoherent fragments of speech were panted rapidly 
out ; scarce pausing for breath, he looked once more up- 
ward at Erceldoune ; with the old unquenched hatred still 
burning dark in his glance. 

“You will have the Vassalis’ fief! Ah! that cuts 
harder than the saber. I would give twenty lives now to 
keep you asunder from her. But — she stung my memory; 
conscience, fools call it ; I could not free her without free- 
ing you, or I would have done. You hate me?” 

“ I pity you — beyond all words.” 

“Because I lie here like a shot cur?” 

“No. Because you wronged her.” 

There was a meaning in the grave and weary answer 
that checked the fretting and galled passions of the dying 
man. 

“Yes, I wronged her. It was for Julian’s wealth that 
I hated her. Sir — you swore to deal me my mortal stroke. 
Keep your oath. Pluck that broken steel out of my loins ; 
I shall not live a minute. You will not? Why, you break 
your vow ! God ! — how the pain burns ! Look here, 
then !” 

With a sudden movement he drew the blade out from 
the wound in which it was bedded; the pent-up blood, let 
loose, poured from it : he smiled. It seemed as though in 
that hour the courage of his Achaean fathers flowed into 


“I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS!” 587 

the veins that were fast changing to ice beneath the throes 
of dissolution. 

“ My life has disgraced you : ray death will not,” he 
said, as his heavy eyes were lifted to hers. “ Can you for- 
give all ?” 

“God is my witness, — all.” 

“Ah, you were ever generous ! Idalia ” 

And with her name thus latest upon his utterance, as it 
had been the latest utterance of so many, his head fell back 
upon her bosom, and through his parted lips the lingering 
breath came in one long, deep-drawn sigh. 

When that sigh ceased to quiver in the silence, he lay 
dead in the morning light. 

The low, dark entrance had filled in that moment with 
armed men ; their weapons dropped blood, their faces were 
hot with the heat of war and of victory, their passions 
were at white heat with the madness of joy; they were of 
that nature which long before showed its southern grandeur 
in the midnight charge of the Aurelian trench, and made 
the five hundred of the Legion pierce their way through 
the dense and hostile host at Mazzarene. At their head 
was the young boy Berto ; all his slender limbs quivering 
with the glory of triumph, and his fair face, with the yel- 
low hair flung back, transfigured like the face of some angel 
of vengeance. He came eagerly through the gloom of the 
porchway, followed by the Italians, who obeyed him as 
though he were a god ; he had received the baptism of 
blood when his mother had been shot down by the Papal 
troops ; he was the son of a great patriot who had fallen 
at the gates of Rome; and while yet in the first years of 
his infancy he had stood at the knee of the Liberator, and 
laughed to see the balls pour down upon the Savarelli roof 
around them, the hands of Ugo Bassi had been laid in 
benediction upon the golden curls of the young child of 
liberty. His word was the law, his sword was the scepter, 
of the men who came with him now. 

Breathless, covered with dust, bruised, wounded, but 
with a marvelous luminance beaming through the calm, 
unchanged repose of his colorless face, he came to her in 
the flush of his triumph. 

“Eccellenza! we bring you the best gifts of life! — we 
bring you liberty; we bring you vengeance.” 


588 


IDA LI A. 


Then, as he saw the dead man lying there, his proud and 
glad voice dropped, he made a soft, backward movement 
of his hand, signing his followers to pause upon the 
threshold, he bent his delicate head in reverence. 

“ He has won higher guerdon than we,” he said, gravely; 
“he has died for you.” 

For he had no knowledge that this one hour of remorse 
had been the single, narrow thread of gold unraveled from 
the long, twisted, tangled, poisoned web of a lifetime of 
wrong. 


CHAPTER XXXVI. 

“LOST in the night, and the light op the sea.” 

Around the high- leaping flames of a fresh pile of pine- 
boughs, that flashed their luster on the hanging crystals 
and the hollow depths of the cavern by the sea, the Ital- 
ians who had freed her were gathered when the night had 
fallen. They stood in a half circle about the great pyramid 
of fire, whose heavy aromatic scent rolled out down the 
vaulted space; the light and shadow played upon their 
bronzed faces, on the metal of the rifles, on whose muzzles 
they leaned their hands, and in the darkness of their eyes 
that were lustrous with longing rage and impatient joy. 
Joy for the sweetness of the surpassing hope that the past 
day had brought ; Palermo won, Naples would follow ; their 
sail once loosened to the touch, they would be with the 
Thousand of Marsala, with the deliverers of Sicily. Rage 
against a prisoner set in their midst, a prisoner who had 
been false to Italy, and false to the woman whom they 
loved as soldier and servant, noble and minstrel, alike loved 
Mary Stuart. 

The silence was unbroken even by a loud-drawn breath ; 
the sound of the flame consuming the lithe limbs of the 
wood was the only thing that stirred it. They waited for 
her judgment, and they had known that judgment inexo- 


“LOST IN NIGHT. AND THE LIGHT OF THE SEA.” 58? 

rable as those given from the stone justice seat in the early 
ages of her own city of the Violet Crown. With his arms 
bound behind him, while they stood around him, ready to 
spring at a word upon him and sheathe their steel in his 
body with the fierce swift justice of the south, they held 
captive the man who had sold her to Giulio Villaflor. 

To this end had his high ambitions come. 

He had known that, soon or late, his sin of treachery 
would almost surely find him out ; would reach him though 
he were housed within kings’ palaces ; woirld strike him 
down even amid those gods of gold and silver for which 
he had bartered his brethren. Yet the vengeance he had 
looked for had been the concrete vengeance for his out- 
raged oath, of his forsaken order ; of that body politic to 
which he had sworn the secret vows of his implicit obe- 
dience ; and even this vengeance, in the oversight of that 
intelligence which deemed itself safe enough and sure 
enough to play with all, and remain true to none, Victor 
Vane had held lightly. Rulers who wore the purple ol 
power had been scarcely less false to such oaths than he, 
and he had thought that for him as for them the blow 
might be temporized with, warded off, bought off, until he 
like them should have risen too high for. even that uner- 
ring and invisible hand to reach. But now, by the men 
whom he had scorned, with all the scorn of his astute abili- 
ties, as the mere raw material that may be turned to the. 
statesman’s successes, the fools of patriotic visions and 
rude honesties, of childish faith, and of barbarian warfare r 
by these he had been baffled, checked, vanquished, meshed 
in the intricate web of his own treacheries ; by these he 
had been conquered and dragged down, to stand in his dis- 
honor before the one glance which had power to make 
that dishonor worse to him than a thousand pangs ot 
death. To this end had his life come ! 

An end more bitter to him it could never have reached, 
if his limbs had swung in the hot air of Naples from the 
hangman’s chains. The hooting lips and ravenous eyes 
of the million of upturned faces of a railing populace 
would have been powerless to bring home to him his 
shame, as one regard bent on him brought it now. 

For beyond the undulating wave of flame, and with tha% 
50 


590 


ID ALIA. 


gulf of fire and of shadow parting them, the gaze ot 
Idalia rested on him. 

At her side Ereeldoune stood. His head was bent, his 
eyes were on the ground, and his arms were folded on his 
breast ; he knew that if he looked up or unloosed his hand, 
he should break the word that he had passed to leave 
their vengeance with her, he should forestall the death- 
stroke that the soldiers of the revolution waited there to 
strike. 

She faced them in the deep hush of the silence; so deep 
that through the cavern the far-off chiming of the waters 
on the shore could be faintly heard. The warm glow of 
the pine flames, like the red sun that burns on the Nile, 
fell about her in a splendor of hot tawny gold. Her eyes 
were dark and dreaming, as with the memories and secrets 
of innumerable ages, like the unfathomable luster of the 
eyes that poets give to Cleopatra ; her mouth was grave 
and weary as with the languor of past and deadly pain; 
her brow was in shadow, as though the shade of the thorn- 
crown of those who suffer for the people still was there ; 
yet on her face there was a light beyond that which the 
burning sea-pines shed. It was the light of the dawn of 
freedom. 

She never spoke ; but her gaze rested on the man who 
had betrayed her into captivity — who had spoken falsely 
against her honor — who had given her beauty to the 
scourge, her freedom to the chains of her enemies. And 
he who was no coward, but bold and sure, and of self-con- 
trol passing those of most men, closed his own eyes involun- 
tarily, as though the lightning smote them, and cowered 
downward like a shrinking dog. 

For what that long and silent gaze had quoted against 
him was wrong — far heavier than that against her own 
life : wrong against all manhood, as in him stained ; 
against all human nature, as by him shared ; against all 
bonds that bind man to man, as by his treachery dissevered ; 
against all liberty sought for by the nations, as by his false 
adoption of its fair name, prostituted. 

It was such reproach as this which that one unvarying 
gaze spoke to him; and there was soul enough left in him 
to make him know its deepest meaning, and taste its deep- 
est agony. 


“LOST IN NIGHT, AND THE LIGHT OE THE SEA.” 591 

“A traitor I” 

Her lips had never spoken the word ; but its shame ate 
into his heart as it ate into the heart of Iscariot. In that 
one moment the austere, the divine, the supreme majesty 
that lies in truth was revealed to him, and blinded him as 
the blaze of the heavens blinded Saul of Tarsus. In that one 
moment he knew what he had denied all his years through ; 
that men who, for it, render their lives desolate and barren, 
and, for it, die unloved and forsaken of the world, may 
know in life and in death a beauty that never comes to the 
multitudes who grasp at gold, at power, at the sweetness 
of lascivious ease, and at the wide fools’ paradise of lies. 

The Italians who stood around him, leaning on their 
loaded rifles, while ever and again upon him turned the 
waiting savage brilliance of their glances, gave an impa- 
tient movement that shook the clangor from their arms out 
in a shrill echo. 

“ His sentence, Eccellenza !” 

They were thirsty to deal him a traitor’s due; to lead 
him out yonder on to the starlit sand, and with one volley 
fired on the still night air give him the death that all de- 
serters meet, and see this justice done ere their boat should 
be thrust through the foam, and their oars should cleave 
the waters apart, and their vessel should be reached, that 
would bear them southward to where the Sicilies lay. 

She made them no reply. Still with her eyes fixed on 
him she stood with the light that was like the after-glow of 
Egypt full upon her. To him she ceased to be the woman 
he had loved and coveted; she seemed to him transfigured ; 
with that mystery of thought, with that infinitude of re- 
proach, with that passionless scorn, and with that passion- 
less pity on her face, she looked to him like the avenging 
shape of the honor he had sold, of the land he had be- 
trayed, of the freedom he had surrendered, of the cause he 
had forsaken. The rebuke of her gaze was not hers, but 
the rebuke of the peoples, weary and abandoned by the 
leader who bartered them for gold ; the scorn of her gaze 
was the scorn of the martyrs of liberty, who through all 
ages perish willingly, if with their bodies they can purchase 
one ray of higher light for the world which knows them 
not until too late 


592 


ID ALIA. 


By her he saw how vile he had become. 

By her he saw how high he might have reached. 

She had her vengeance. 

The impatient fire of the same demand ran afresh through 
the revolutionists around him : 

“ His sentence, Eccellenza !” 

He never heard. He had passed through all the bit- 
terness of death ; it was her look that killed him. 

The cry rose louder : “ His sentence I’ 7 

Then at last she answered them : 

“ Loose him, and let him go. 77 

A sullen furious yell of dissent that not even their loyalty 
to her could still, rolled through the vault. 

U E traditore! E traditoreV 7 

By his crime they claimed their justice. 

A heavy sigh parted her lips ; then the full sweet melody 
of her voice came on the clamor like music that moves men 
to tears. 

“A traitor — yes ! And for that you would deal him 
death ? Nay, think me not gentler than you. I meant 
to deliver him up to your hands. I bade him be brought 
to my judgment, that your vengeance might strike him, 
and lay him dead at my feet. I am no holier than you. 
There was an hour in which I longed for his life with that 
thirst you know now ; there was an hour in which I would 
have taken it, and not spared, though his mother had 
prayed to me. Ah, friends 1 such hours come to all. But 
now, the darkness has passed. I see clearer. Heath is 
not ours to deal. And were it ours, should we give him 
the nameless mystic mercy which all men live to crave ; 
give it as the chastisement of crime ? Death ! It is rest 
to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality 
to the poet. It is a vast, dim, exhaustless pity to all the 
world. And would you summon it as your hardest cruelty 
to sin ?” 

They were silent ; she stirred their souls — she had not 
bound their passions. 

“A traitor merits death, 77 they muttered. 

'‘Merits it! Not so. The martyr, the liberator, the 
seeker of truth, may deserve its peace ; how has the traitor 
won them ? You deem yourselves just ; your justice errs- 


“LOST IN NIGHT, AND THE LIGHT OP THE SEA.” 593 

If you would give him justice, make him live. Live to 
know fear lest every wind among the leaves may whisper 
of his secret ; live to feel the look of a young child’s eyes 
a shame to him ; live to envy every peasant whose bread 
has not been bought with tainted coin ; live to hear ever 
in his path the stealing step of haunting retribution ; live 
to see his brethren pass by him as a thing accurst ; live to 
listen in his age to white-haired men, who once had been 
his comrades, tell to the youth about them the unforgotten 
story of his shame. Make him live thus if you would have 
justice.” 

They answered nothing ; a shudder ran through them as 
they heard. 

“And if you have — as I — a deliverance that forbids you 
even so much harshness, still let him live, and bury his 
transgression in your hearts. Say to him as I say ; — 
‘your sin was great, go forth and sin no more.’ ” 

Then, as the words left her lips, she moved to him from 
out the light, and stooped, and severed the bonds that 
bound him, and left him free ; and none dared touch that 
which she had made sacred, but stood mute, and afraid, as 
those who stand in the presence of a soul that is greater 
than their own. 

And the man who had sinned against her, fell at her 
feet. 

“ Oh, God ! If I had known you as I know you now I” 

“ You never had betrayed me. No ! — Live, then, to be 
true to greater things than 1.” 

While the night was still young, a ship glided south- 
ward through the wide white radiance of the moon. The 
waters stretched, one calm and gleaming sheet of violet 
light; from the fast-retreating shore a fair wind came, 
bearing the fragrance of a thousand hills and plains, of 
golden fruits and flowers of snow, and passion-blossoms 
of purple, and the scarlet heart of ripe pomegranates ; 
through the silence sounded the cool fresh ripple of the 
waves as the vessel left her track upon the phosphor-sil- 
ver, and above, from a million stars, a purer day seemed to 
dawn on all the aromatic perfumes of the air, and all the 
dim unmeasured freedom of the seas. And she, who went 
2 N 


591 


ID ALIA. 


to freedom, looked, and looked, and looked, as though 
never could her sight rest long enough upon the limitless 
radiance, nor her lips drink enough in of the sweet fresh 
delicious treasure that the waters gave and the winds 
brought ; — the treasure of her liberty. 

“You come to my kingdom !” she said softly, while her 
dreaming eyes met her lover’s. 

And he who had cleaved to her with that surpassing 
love which calumny but strengthens and fire but purifies, 
which fear cannot enter and death cannot appall, drew her 
beauty closer to his breast : 

“ My kingdom is here I” 

And the ship swept on through the stillness of the 
hushed hours, through the glory of the light, to glide out 
through the eternal sea-gates of the old Roman world, and 
pass into the cloudless glow of eastern skies, where already 
through the voluptuous night the star of morning rose. 


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